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The Plymouth Experiment
(original title ?Thanksgiving)
by: Kim Weissman
November 28, 1999
This week the nation once again celebrated
Thanksgiving, 379 years after the Pilgrims
established their colony at Plymouth Plantation in
1620. This year, as in many years past,
schoolchildren across the nation have spent the few
days before the holiday talking about turkeys and
Pilgrims, making lists of what they are thankful
for, and a fair share have been brainwashed by
politically correct ?and false ?revisionist
history of the first Thanksgiving in 1621.
That first Thanksgiving, they have been told, came
about because the Pilgrims, incompetent farmers that
they were, nearly starved to death in that first
winter on the hostile shores of the new continent.
The following spring, the kindly local Indians
showed them how to plant crops and hunt wild game,
and when the fall rolled around and the harvest was
gathered, the Pilgrims were so pleased with their
bountiful crops that they held a celebration to
thank the Indians for saving their lives.
That thanks, as the tale unfolds, soon turned to
genocide as, in later years, the evil white
Europeans turned their firearms on the Indians who,
being peace-loving and unfamiliar with such fearful
weapons of destruction, were driven from the
ancestral lands which they had tended in supreme
harmony with nature. The history of our nation was
all downhill from there. Very satisfying to the
politically correct, hitting all the high points
which children must know: ungrateful white intruders
from Europe, malicious use of firearms, and peaceful
and magnanimous Indians victimized by religious
zealots. Nice and satisfying to some. And for the
most part, incontrovertibly false.
The Pilgrims, of course, were not the first
Europeans to venture onto this continent. Columbus
came here more than a century earlier, and the
natives he first encountered were the Carib tribe,
who were cannibals. And evidence discovered several
years ago points to a European presence on this
continent which may have dated back 9000 years
before that (pre-dating, incidentally, today's
self-proclaimed "Native Americans"). Later, European
fishing vessels and fur trappers and traders made
frequent visits to these shores and gave the
Indians, among other things, a knowledge of
firearms.
According to the diary of William Bradford, the
sometime governor of Plymouth Plantation (Of
Plymouth Plantation, 1620-1647), the Pilgrims
encountered many Indian tribes when they landed
here; some friendly, some not so friendly, and some
hostile and perfectly willing to attack the Pilgrims
?which they often did ?with the firearms they had
obtained from the earlier traders. Bradford wrote
that some of the tribes were already hostile to each
other when the Pilgrims arrived, and some had been
engaged in inter-tribal warfare for years. Often it
was because the Pilgrims allied themselves with one
tribe that they were attacked by another, hostile to
the first. There was in fact an excess of barbarity
on all sides. But now to that first deadly winter at
Plymouth Plantation, and the subsequent feast of
thanks.
Before leaving Europe the Pilgrims entered into a
contract, dated July 1, 1620, with the merchant
investors (called the "Adventurers") who financed
the trip. That contract provided,
"The persons transported and the Adventurers shall
continue their joint stock and partnership together,
the space of seven years…during which time all
profits and benefits that are got by trade, traffic,
trucking, working, fishing, or any other means of
any person or persons, remain in the common stock
until division."
The contract further provided,
"That at the end of the seven years, the capital and
profits, viz. the houses, lands, goods and chattels,
be equally divided betwixt the Adventurers and
Planters; which done, every man shall be free from
other of them of any debt or detriment concerning
this adventure."
In short, the Pilgrims agreed to establish a
commune, with all property and the fruits of all
labor contributed into a common pool to be divided
equally among the Pilgrims for their daily survival,
and between the Pilgrims and the financiers at the
end of the seven year contract. They called their
arrangement a "commonwealth", because all wealth ?
the product of their labors ?was held in common,
and there was no private property to speak of. The
modern term for this is socialism. Even back then
they had a word for it which we know today, derived
from the concept of commonly owned property:
communism. The arrangement was no more successful in
the 17th century than it has been in our own
century. Human nature being what it is, even among
the pious Pilgrims, those who work and produce grow
resentful when the fruits of their labor are taken
and given over to those who do not work, in shares
equal to their own, with no reward for their own
hard labor.
The first winter was indeed a time of privation and
death for the Pilgrims, for the simple reasons that
they had landed in the new continent too late in the
season for planting crops, and without sufficient
time and energy following their debilitating voyage
to construct housing adequate to protect them from
the fast approaching New England winter. Half of
them died.
The following spring they planted, hunted, and
fished to provision the small colony. Their harvest
that fall was barely sufficient to meet the needs of
the frugal Pilgrims. Every day they looked to God
for salvation, and following that first harvest they
gave thanks for their survival. But they did not
give thanks to the Indians ?even contemplating such
an idea would have been a sacrilege to such devoutly
religious people ?they gave thanks to their Lord
who had spared them and provided for them. Bradford
wrote, "And thus they found the Lord to be with them
in all their ways, and to bless their outgoings and
incomings, for which let His holy name have the
praise forever, to all posterity."
Bradford, writing in 1621 regarding their first
harvest (and his only commentary on the first
Thanksgiving),
"They began now to gather in the small harvest they
had, and to fit up their houses and dwellings
against winter, being all well recovered in health
and strength and had all things in good plenty. For
as some were thus employed in affairs abroad, others
were exercised in fishing, about cod and bass and
other fish, of which they took good store, of which
every family had their portion. All the summer there
was no want; and now began to come in store of fowl,
as winter approached, of which this place did abound
when they came first (but afterwards decreased by
degrees). And besides waterfowl there was great
store of wild turkeys, of which they took many,
besides venison, etc. Besides they had about a peck
a meal a week to a person, or now since harvest,
Indian corn to that proportion. Which made many
afterwards write so largely of their plenty here to
their friends in England, which were not feigned but
true reports."
One Pilgrim, Edward Winslow, wrote to a friend in
England describing the celebration of that first
harvest, by letter dated December 11, 1621,
"Our harvest being gotten in, our Governor sent four
men on fowling, that so we might after a more
special manner rejoice together, after we had
gathered the fruit of our labours. 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
amongst the rest their greatest king, Massasoit with
some 90 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."
The Pilgrims did invite friendly local Indians to
join in their feast, and those Indians, as any
courteous guest would do at that time of meager
provisions, and as we often do today when we are
invited to someone's home, brought food to
contribute to the feast.
But the harvests were not as abundant as they might
have been, and Governor Bradford and the leading
citizens were troubled. They still depended on trade
and supply ships for a significant portion of their
provisions, and given the nature of seaborne travel
in those days, the arrival of those ships was
erratic. They barely produced enough food to sustain
themselves, and much of their labor went into
hunting and fishing, so as to supplement their own
needs and to be able to send some furs and salted
fish back to pay the debts owed to their financiers
in Europe. So the leaders of the colony gathered
together, and after much debate they decided to make
a fundamental change in the way their colony was
organized. They had found the system of communism to
be terribly harmful, and so they replaced it with a
system of private property. In 1623 Bradford wrote a
lengthy passage into his diary describing their
momentous decision to allow, as he put it, every man
to work "for his own particular", to work his own
crops on his own land:
"All this while no supply was heard of, neither knew
they when they might expect any. So they began to
think how they might raise as much corn as they
could, and obtain a better crop than they had done,
that they might not still thus languish in misery.
At length, after much debate of things, the Governor
(with the advice of the chiefest amongst them) gave
way that they should set corn every man for his own
particular, and in that regard trust to themselves
... This had very good success, for it made all
hands very industrious, so as much more corn was
planted than otherwise would have been by any means
the Governor or any other could use, and saved him a
great deal of trouble, and gave far better content.
The women now went willingly into the field, and
took their little ones with them to set corn, which
before would allege weakness and inability, whom to
have compelled would have been thought great tyranny
and oppression. The experience that was had in this
common course and condition, tried sundry years and
that amongst Godly and sober men, may well evince
the vanity of that conceit of Plato's and other
ancients applauded by some of later times, that the
taking away of property and bringing in community
into a commonwealth would make them happy and
flourishing, as if they were wiser than God. For
this community was found to breed much confusion and
discontent and retard much employment that would
have been to their benefit and comfort. For the
young men, that were most able and fit for labour
and service, did repine that they should spend their
time and strength to work for other men's wives and
children without any recompense. The strong, or man
of parts, had no more in division of victuals and
clothes than he that was weak and not able to do a
quarter the other could, this was thought injustice.
?And for men's wives to be commanded to do service
for other men, as dressing their meat, washing their
clothes, etc., they deemed it a kind of slavery,
neither could many husbands brook it. Upon the point
all being to have alike, and all to do alike, they
thought themselves in the like condition, and one as
good as another; and so, if it did not cut off those
relations that God hath set amongst men, yet it did
at least diminish and take off the mutual respects
that should be preserved amongst them."
More than a century and a half later, in 1790, an
American named James Wilson wrote a treatise titled
Lectures on Law. Wilson was a signer of the
Declaration of Independence in 1776, a delegate to
the Constitutional Convention in 1787, and was later
appointed by President George Washington as an
Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. In his
1790 work, Wilson wrote,
"…all commerce [in Plymouth] was carried on in one
joint stock. All things were common to all, and the
necessaries of life were daily distributed from the
public store?. The colonists were sometimes in
danger of starving; and severe whipping, which was
often administered to promote labor, was only
productive of constant and general discontent... .
The introduction of exclusive property immediately
produced the most comfortable change in the colony,
by engaging the affections and invigorating the
pursuits of its inhabitants."
The benefit of private property and the destructive
effects of socialism were quickly recognized by the
Pilgrims, and they survived because of those
discoveries. Those lessons were taken to heart by
our Founders and enshrined in our Constitution. Yet
too many people today continue to ignore those
lessons. The persistent attempts to impose socialist
plans and welfare-state wealth redistribution in our
country, attacks on private property and individual
achievement, the provocation of class envy, and the
efforts to instill those ideas in our children
through mis-education and demagoguery, continue to
cause untold damage and mischief. All spawned by
those ideologues who consider themselves smarter
than anyone else; those who, as Bradford put it,
have the "vanity of that conceit…as if they were
wiser than God".
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