Ep. 63 - Thanksgiving： The Land Was Ours
Summary
The Mayflower, the Pilgrims, Thanksgiving, and the founding of our country. The land was ours before we were the lands. Those are the words of Robert Frost, but they could have been uttered by the pilgrims.
Transcript
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Those are the words of Robert Frost, but they could have been uttered by the Pilgrims,
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who were convinced of a divine providence guiding their voyage on the Mayflower to found a new Canaan in the New World.
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We will explain the true story of the Mayflower, the Pilgrims, Thanksgiving, and our national destiny.
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Back to Thanksgiving and the founding of our country.
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Now that we've got a little capitalism going on.
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The left today mocks claims of a divine hand in our founding, in the founding of our country.
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I think the reason they can so easily dismiss providence is because they're almost entirely ignorant of the history.
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This is why they'll also claim that purely benevolent Indians selflessly saved the pilgrims from starvation,
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only to be betrayed by the English ingrates and callously wiped out.
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Thanksgiving is the cause of much historical myth-making.
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I don't mean the divine providence of the pilgrims' passage.
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I don't mean the myths of the patriotic variety, that the pilgrims and the natives sat down,
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they shared food and goods together, they forged bonds of friendship and peace.
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But the circumstances under which war came after 55 years of relatively unbroken peace
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is far more complicated than the revisionists would claim.
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The pilgrims were not greedy conquistadores, and the Indians weren't helpless innocents.
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But for the actions and decisions of particular men reacting to complex circumstances.
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I personally have a particular interest in the Mayflower Voyagers because, despite my swarthy
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Sicilian skin tone, I descend from four of them.
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Only one of them was a pilgrim, Dr. Samuel Fuller.
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He was the only physician in the colony, although his medical training is somewhat doubtful.
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These were the non-pilgrim passengers on the Mayflower.
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One great-great-great-great-great-grandpappy Knowles is Stephen Hopkins, who 11 years prior
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to the Mayflower's voyage had already traveled to the New World, and he had shipwrecked in
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Bermuda, an incident on which Shakespeare's The Tempest is based.
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Another is Francis Eaton, and the third is John Billington, who Plymouth Governor William
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Bradford called a knave with a family that was, quote, one of the profanest among them.
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Great-great-great-great-great-grandpappy Billington appears to have been the biggest degenerate
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of the Plymouth gang, he was regularly punished for rabble-rousing, and eventually he was executed
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His son John wandered off and almost caused a war, and his wife Eleanor was sentenced
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to sit in the stocks and be whipped for slander.
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Did God ordain the Mayflower Passage and the founding of America?
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In his account of Plymouth Plantation, he wrote of the group, they knew they were pilgrims.
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They wrote of themselves, quote, we verily believe and trust the Lord is with us, and
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that he will graciously prosper our endeavors according to the simplicity of our hearts therein.
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It is not with us as with other men, whom small things can discourage, or small discontentments
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That was a good thing, because just about every obstacle imaginable appeared to prevent
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The pilgrims, for those who don't know, they came from a separatist church that thought
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the Church of England was so corrupt it could not possibly be reformed from within and must
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One can only imagine what they would think of my own potpourri, of one of their descendants.
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In the 16th century, several separatists had been jailed and killed, and since the 1603
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coronation of King James, pressure to conform began to mount, so the pilgrims left England
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After a decade there, the group feared their children were becoming too Dutch, a fate worse
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than death, and so they decided to found a new colony in the New World where they could
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worship God as they saw fit, unmolested by overbearing governments and those decadent
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But as they prepared to depart, pilgrim William Brewster published a tract critical of King
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Now, as a young man, Brewster had served as an assistant to Queen Elizabeth's Secretary
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of State, a man named William Davison, and now the king ordered his arrest, which forced
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The pilgrims contracted Master Christopher Jones and his sweet ship, the Mayflower, along
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The Mayflower was called a sweet ship because it had sailed the English Channel for over a
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decade, carrying French wine, and the spilt French wine tempered the stench of the bilge
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Some might see the pervading presence of the wine in this first act of departure, the first
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miracle performed by Christ and a symbol of Christ himself, as an early glimpse of God's
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The second ship, the Speedwell, sprang a leak after reaching Southampton, and another at
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Dartmouth, having decided that the ship was unable to sail, all of the passengers loaded
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Only later was it learned that the Speedwell's master, Captain Reynolds, had been conspiring
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The Dutch, you remember those damn decadent Dutch, they had sought to prevent the English
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from settling Manhattan, and so they enlisted Reynolds in their efforts to thwart the trans-Atlantic
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Ironically, this act of sabotage may have saved the colony in its early years.
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By forcing all of the passengers onto one ship, the separatists and the strangers had
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Had the Speedwell survived, there likely would have been very little contact between the two
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Now the pilgrims saw evidence of God's work in just about everything.
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It's an evil generation that looks for signs and wonders, but it's a stupid generation
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Almost immediately, a sailor began to mock the pilgrims' seasickness.
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You can imagine it, a sea-hardened sailor starts making fun of these Christian zealots.
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As Bradford tells it, quote, a proud and profane young man would always be condemning our poor
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people in their sickness and cursing them daily with grievous execrations.
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The young man boasted of hoping, quote, to help to cast half of them overboard before they
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But it pleased God, before they came half-seas over, to smite this young man with a grievous
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disease, of which he died in a desperate manner, and so was himself the first that was thrown
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Not to put too fine a point on the incident and what it meant for the pilgrims' project,
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It was an astonishment to all his fellows, for they noted it to be the just hand of God
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The rest of the sailors kept their mouths shut.
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After 65 days, the Mayflower made landfall, not at their intended and legally granted
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destination of New York, but hundreds of miles northeast at Cape Cod, where the settlers
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They'd been granted land by the Hudson River, but not where they landed.
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When the passengers learned of this, a group of mutineers, led by not one but two of my ancestors,
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rose up to make, quote, discontented and mutinous speeches.
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Fortunately, few on board listened to them, and the Voyagers signed the Mayflower Compact,
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a, quote, covenant, to combine ourselves together in a civil body politic for our better ordering
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and preservation and furtherance of the ends aforesaid.
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Bradford called it, quote, a hideous and desolate wilderness.
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Stranger than the environment, however, was its lack of people.
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It was unpeopled because between 1616 and 1619, bubonic plague or some similar disease
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was introduced by European fishermen in modern Maine.
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It killed an estimated 90% of the inhabitants of New England.
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The disease prompted an outbreak of war among various tribes vying for power in the chaos.
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No one remained to bury the dead, which left the pilgrims to wonder at the whitened bones
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The Indians already had some familiarity with Europeans.
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In 1614, Captain John Smith of Pocahontas fame, that one, the cartoon guy, he led a voyage
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around the region during which his commander, Thomas Hunt, captured and enslaved a group
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This led the Indians to slaughter all but three or four of a later group of French travelers
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who shipwrecked on Cape Cod the next year in 1615.
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The men who were spared ended up being tortured and enslaved.
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But one of them promised an Indian, in the Indians' own language, that God was angry with
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them for their wickedness and would destroy them and give their country to another people.
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This was a prophecy doubtless fulfilled and another evidence of the Almighty's plan for
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By Provincetown Harbor, where the pilgrims first landed, they found a gigantic bushel of
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They were worried about their ability to feed themselves.
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And there was just a huge sack of corn, so much that two men could not carry all of it.
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So they decided to grab the corn and compensate the bushel's owner later on because, as you
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know, it's easier to ask forgiveness than permission.
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The pilgrims did, however, refuse to loot what appeared to be Indian burial places, despite
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Certainly, they would have been useful to the pilgrims, but they said, quote, it would be
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Within a short spell, at least 30 Indians descended on the pilgrims screaming war cries and flinging
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Miraculously, not a single Mayflower passenger left the encounter with a scratch.
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They realized their new neighbors were not exactly well disposed toward them, so Bradford
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set out to look for a better settlement option.
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After a month, he discovered Plymouth Bay, where the situation was even stranger.
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There were whole fields perfectly cleared for agriculture, but there were no people to
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Bradford saw in this a clear sign from the Lord, a place that they randomly found, apparently
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randomly found, perfectly cleared and ready for them to plant.
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He returned to the Mayflower to share his discovery.
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He was so thankful to God, but upon returning, tragedy struck.
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Bradford learned that Dorothy May, his wife of seven years and mother of his three-year-old
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son, had slipped over the side of the Mayflower and drowned.
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You might be thinking, hmm, it's difficult to slip over the side of an anchored boat.
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While historian Cotton Mather called the death an accident, many believe it to have been
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Dorothy May hadn't seen her son in four months, a seven-year-old child on the ship
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had just died, and two more children were ill to the point of death.
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On top of all of that, and on top of the typically cold New England weather, a little ice age had
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Until Bradford's return, five days after his wife's death, the Mayflower passengers had
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little reason to expect their lot would improve.
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Bradford himself then fell ill as the Voyagers settled into Plymouth.
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He requested some beer from the Mayflower to aid in his recovery.
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The sailors, fearful that their booze supply would run out before they made it back to England,
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well, the water at that time was virtually undrinkable, so they needed to drink beer on the
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way, they responded that if Bradford were their own father, he should have none, quote.
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Remember what happened to the last sailor who gave Pilgrims lip?
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In a replay of that incident, they all started to get sick and die.
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The coincidence even prompted one young officer on the ship to a deathbed conversion.
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Master Jones, too, had a change of heart, and he gave the Pilgrims their beer.
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During February and March of that horrible winter, two or three colonists died per day.
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By spring, a majority of the settlers who had originally arrived at Provincetown, 52 out
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Here's where things start to get really, really strange.
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As if they weren't strange enough already, here's where it gets to Occam's razor.
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On March 16th, just two or three months after settling in at Plymouth, a lone Indian walked
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He saluted his new neighbors and said two words.
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Interestingly, for the racial politics revisionists, the Pilgrims made no mention in their records
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He was a sachem visiting from Maine, where he'd learned some English from fishermen, and
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he just happened to be visiting in precisely the area at precisely the time the English
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had accidentally landed after they missed New York but didn't know to sail up to the next
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Right exactly where they were, apparently by accident.
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If that weren't coincidental enough, in the following days, Samoset returned with another
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He chatted with the Pilgrims about his favorite areas of Spain and his favorite neighborhoods
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Years earlier, Squanto had been abducted by Thomas Hunt, sold into slavery in Spain, escaped
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or was possibly rescued by monks, made his way to England somehow, hopped a boat to Newfoundland,
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and walked all the way down to Plymouth, where the Poconocan Indian chief Massasoit enslaved
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The Poconocan Indian chief right near where the Pilgrims landed, right at the mark that they
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The Pilgrims, after landing 300 miles off their mark, stumbled on perhaps the only person
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in the Western Hemisphere with a command of the English language.
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Occam's Razor says, among competing hypotheses, the one with the fewest assumptions should be
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So either endless, unique, and impossibly improbable events just happened to occur, or God sent
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Squanto, unsurprisingly, became the liaison between the Pilgrims and their new neighbors.
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William Brewster, ever the diplomat, orchestrated a diplomatic reception of the Poconocan Sachem
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Massasoit, replete with pillows and carpets and trumpets and drums.
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Within only a few years, Squanto had gone from a slave to the single most powerful person
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in the region, as only he could communicate between the English and the Indians, and he
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Governor Bradford loved him like a family member.
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He also played the situation to get an upper hand on Massasoit and the Poconocans.
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There is a bit of strange symbolism in the name Squanto itself.
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Squanto was named after the Indian spirit of night and darkness and cold wind, the spirit
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There was another one, another indispensable Indian to the Pilgrims, a man by the name
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Nathaniel Philbrick, in his excellent story, The Mayflower, in his excellent book, he puts
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A group of people so singularly devoted to serving God that they sailed halfway around
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the world to do it became entirely dependent on two Indians named Satan.
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The surrounding Indian tribes, in turn, became jealous of the Poconocan Indian Alliance, as
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it greatly strengthened Massasoit's position in the region.
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The Matapoiset chief, Corbatant, tried to break the alliance by capturing poor little
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But while the Pilgrims were generally peaceful, it is nevertheless and always remains a bad idea
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to mess with fire and brimstone zealots who know they have God on their side.
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Governor Bradford ordered Plymouth's military commander, Miles Standish, to go after Corbatant
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Standish was already chomping at the bit to do it, and wouldn't you know, all of this
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had the effect of making all the petty sachems much friendlier toward the English.
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It occurred around Michaelmas, Michaelmas, which is in late September, early October.
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Contrary to popular revisionism, it actually did resemble not only our 20th century ideas
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of Thanksgiving, but even the dinners that we have today.
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There was a lot of corn, squash, beans, barley, peas.
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They possibly also ate striped bass and bluefish and cod.
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Nassasoit and his Indian pals showed up with around 100 people, more than twice the English
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But he knew his manners, and he didn't show up empty-handed.
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The entire meal was cooked by the four adult women who survived that awful first winter,
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half of whom lead the genetic line all the way down to little old me.
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This festival, however, was not religious in the way that we would consider Thanksgiving.
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The real Thanksgiving didn't happen until two years later in 1623 when Governor Bradford
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This was a civil affair recognized by the civil authority, and it didn't celebrate English-Indian
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cooperation, as they may have celebrated two years earlier.
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Rather, the pilgrims were thankful that year that they ditched communism in favor of private
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property, which had in turn given them abundance.
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You see, the pilgrims had tried what they called the common course.
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Not common core, that's also bad, but the common course.
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Communal ownership of property, land, and wealth.
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Turns out it made everybody lazy, dishonest, and thieving.
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On the brink of starvation in 1623, Bradford instituted private property.
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This had very good success, for it made all hands very industrious, so as much more corn
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was planted than otherwise would have been by any means the governor or any other could
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use, and saved him a great deal of trouble and gave far better content.
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The women now willingly went into the field and took their little ones with them to set
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corn, which before would allege weakness and inability, whom to have compelled would
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have been thought great tyranny and oppression.
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It's amazing, when you give people a stake in their own abundance and their own work,
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And by the way, this was not just a conclusion about a particular experience.
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Bradford explicitly condemned communism, in all its forms and all its lies and all its
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empty promises, as absurd and contrary to God's will.
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The experience that was had in this common course and condition, tried sundry years, and
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that amongst godly and sober men, may well evince the vanity of that conceit of Plato's
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and other ancients applauded by some of later times, little did he know of even later times,
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that the taking away of property and bringing in community into a common wealth would make
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them happy and flourishing, as if they were wiser than God.
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Within two years of landfall, these earliest Americans already realized that communism is
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the worst. Anti-communism is as American as apple pie and Thanksgiving.
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While most local Indian tribes played nice, the Narragansetts refused to abide the Poconocet
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English Alliance, and they threatened war by sending arrowheads wrapped in snakeskin to
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Well, they're not going to take that, so the pilgrims sent bullets and gunpowder wrapped
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Another reminder, it is not a good idea to mess with religious zealots who travel around the
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world to live in freezing, desolate wilderness because God is on their side. Do not mess
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Now, like any sane society, to protect against threats from without, the pilgrims built a
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big, beautiful wall around their settlement. Hundreds, if not thousands of trees were felled,
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the pilgrims lugged the mass of timber by hand, and it stood more than half a mile in length
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and over eight feet tall. The wall's construction was met by shrieking protests and stupid pink
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hats. I'm just kidding. That wouldn't happen in America for almost 400 more years.
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Indian relations continued relatively well, very often with the pilgrims playing peacemakers
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and intervening on behalf of their Indian friends with other tribes. When Massasoit demanded
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Squanto's head after an attempted coup, the pilgrims begged for his life. Massasoit agreed,
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though likely he later poisoned him anyway. On his deathbed, Squanto asked Bradford to pray
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for him that he might go to the Englishman's god. Bradford called Squanto, quote,
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a special instrument sent of God for their good beyond their expectation. It's impossible to argue
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with that. He clearly was. The pilgrims at Bradford's command later saved Massasoit's life
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by rushing to his deathbed, cleaning his sores, cooking him food, administering what little medicine
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they had, doing anything they could, no matter how degrading, no matter how ethereal for Massasoit.
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To thank them, Massasoit told the English of the Massachusetts, unprovoked plan to attack the colony.
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The Massachusetts were going to strike. But this put Bradford in a difficult position.
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The pilgrims didn't want to attack the Massachusetts without provocation. But if they waited for the
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Massachusetts to strike, they were doomed. The Massachusetts wanted to take care of some
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Englishmen on their property, and they knew they'd have to hit Plymouth, too. So what happened?
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Bradford gave the order, Standish set the trap, and the English averted war by carrying the head of
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Sachem Wituwamat back to Plymouth. Now, it's funny to think of those Bush-era activists
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who screaked about how awful and unprecedented preemptive war was for America. Literally,
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the first major military assault waged by our country was preemptive. Not only that, it worked.
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War was averted, and the Indians who conspired against the pilgrims apologized profusely,
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they made amends, and Massasoit consolidated his power even further, creating, thanks to the pilgrims
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for the first time, the Wampanoag Nation. Peace persisted for decades. As the Massachusetts
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Bay Colony and other colonies were formed, Harvard College was founded, Indians converted to
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Christianity by the tribe full, and as a result, Indians ranked among some of the earliest alumni
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of Harvard. I'm certain they were far better educated than those shrieking snowflakes today.
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Missionary John Elliott translated the entire Bible into a phonetic version of the Massachusetts
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language, since the Massachusetts hadn't developed their own written language, both the Old and the
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New Testament. As happened 1,600 years prior in Europe, the advent of Christianity threatened the
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political power of Sachems because Christ's conquest of death on the cross removed political leaders
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only claimed to authority, and this led to jealousy now among other Indian tribes. Peace endured
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virtually unbroken for 55 years. It only broke when Massasoit's own son, Philip, wrongly blamed the
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English for the death of his brother, who more likely died of appendicitis or some other natural
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ailment. Philip vowed revenge. He began selling off land to raise funds for war, and he thereby
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exacerbated the need for war. Local Indians, notably the Christian and Harvard alum John Sassaman,
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warned Plymouth of Philip's plans for war. Many local tribes rebuffed Philip's belligerence and sided
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with the English. Philip even made an alliance with the French against the English, an offense
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unforgivable not only to you and me and all right-thinking people, but also to the fierce and
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not infrequently cannibalistic Mohawk tribe who promptly sided with the English. Looking back, it
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seems miraculous that peace endured so long, until tragically the hot-headed child of the pilgrim's
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dear friend Massasoit acted on a bad hunch and destroyed more than half a century of mutual benefit
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and cooperation, setting the English permanently on their course to possess the whole new world.
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Reflecting on the abject misery the pilgrims endured at the Mayflower's landfall, the miracle
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of their survival, and their great thanks to God for protecting his people, William Bradford wrote,
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What could now sustain them but the spirit of God and his grace? May not and ought not the children
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of these fathers rightly say, Our fathers were Englishmen which came over this great ocean and
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were ready to perish in this wilderness. But they cried unto the Lord, and he heard their voice and
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looked on their adversity. The quintessentially American poet Robert Frost looked on the country's
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destiny with an additional three centuries perspective. He wrote, The land was ours before we
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were the lands. She was our land more than a hundred years before we were her people. She was ours in
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Massachusetts, in Virginia, but we were England's still colonials, possessing what we still were
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unpossessed by, possessed by what we now no more possessed. Something we were withholding made us weak
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until we found out that it was ourselves we were withholding from our land of living and forthwith found
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salvation in surrender. Such as we were, we gave ourselves outright. The deed of gift was many deeds of war.
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To the land vaguely realizing westward, but still unstoried, artless, unenhanced. Such as she was,
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such as she would become. I'm Michael Knowles. This is The Michael Knowles Show. Happy Thanksgiving.
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The Michael Knowles Show is produced by Marshall Benson. Executive producer, Jeremy Boring. Senior producer,
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Jonathan Hay. Supervising producer, Mathis Glover. Our technical producer is Austin Stevens. Edited by
00:26:47.360
Alex Zingaro. Audio is mixed by Mike Coromina. Hair and makeup is by Jesua Olvera. The Michael
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Knowles Show is a Daily Wire Forward Publishing production. Copyright Forward Publishing 2017.