Category: History

Brief narratives about people and events in the American past.

The $5 day

As The New York Times reported, on this date in 1914:

Henry Ford, head of the Ford Motor Company, announced…one of the most remarkable business moves of his entire remarkable career. In brief it is:

To give to the employees of the company $10,000,000 of the profits of the 1914 business, the payments to be made semi-monthly and added to the pay checks.

To run the factory continuously instead of only eighteen hours a day, giving employment to several thousand more men by employing three shifts of eight hours each, instead of only two nine-hour shifts, as at present.

To establish a minimum wage scale of $5 per day. Even the boy who sweeps up the floors will get that much.

Before any man in any department of the company who does not seem to be doing good work shall be discharged, an opportunity will be given to him to try to make good in every other department. No man shall be discharged except for proved unfaithfulness or irremediable inefficiency.

Read the complete Times article.

Thenceforward, and forever free

The Emancipation Proclamation was issued on this date in 1863.

Emancipation ProclamationInitially, the Civil War between North and South was fought by the North to prevent the secession of the Southern states and preserve the Union. Even though sectional conflicts over slavery had been a major cause of the war, ending slavery was not a goal of the war. That changed on September 22, 1862, when President Lincoln issued his Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, which stated that slaves in those states or parts of states still in rebellion as of January 1, 1863, would be declared free. One hundred days later, with the rebellion unabated, President issued the Emancipation Proclamation declaring “that all person held as slaves” within the rebellious areas “are, and henceforward shall be free.”

Lincoln’s bold step to change the goals of the war was a military measure and came just a few days after the Union’s victory in the Battle of Antietam. With this Proclamation he hoped to inspire all blacks, and slaves in the Confederacy in particular, to support the Union cause and to keep England and France from giving political recognition and military aid to the Confederacy. Because it was a military measure, however, the Emancipation Proclamation was limited in many ways. It applied only to states that had seceded from the Union, leaving slavery untouched in the loyal border states. It also expressly exempted parts of the Confederacy that had already come under Union control. Most important, the freedom it promised depended upon Union military victory.

Although the Emancipation Proclamation did not end slavery in the nation, it did fundamentally transform the character of the war. After January 1, 1863, every advance of Federal troops expanded the domain of freedom. Moreover, the Proclamation announced the acceptance of black men into the Union Army and Navy, enabling the liberated to become liberators. By the end of the war, almost 200,000 black soldiers and sailors had fought for the Union and freedom.

From the first days of the Civil War, slaves had acted to secure their own liberty. The Emancipation Proclamation confirmed their insistence that the war for the Union must become a war for freedom. It added moral force to the Union cause and strengthened the Union both militarily and politically. As a milestone along the road to slavery’s final destruction, the Emancipation Proclamation has assumed a place among the great documents of human freedom.

Source: The National Archives

Click document image to enlarge.

Calamity Jane

From Salon via Powell’s Books a review of Calamity Jane: The Woman and the Legend by James D. McLaird. The review begins:

As author James D. McLaird confesses in his conclusion to Calamity Jane: The Woman and the Legend, historians sure know how to ruin a good story. In this case, somebody had to do it. Calamity Jane — 19th century gunslinger, drinker and cross-dresser — was so barnacled over with myth that it had become impossible to see the lady for the lore. From dime-store novels of the 1870s and ’80s chronicling her frontier fearlessness, to Doris Day’s G-rated Jane in the 1953 musical Calamity Jane, to Jane Alexander’s feminist reanimation of her in a 1984 ABC special, to Robin Weigert’s blowsy portrayal of her on the HBO series Deadwood, Calamity Jane has served as a Rorschach blot for devotees of unconventional women for over a century. Then again there was Larry McMurtry’s Buffalo Girls — published in 1990 — which trashed the myth altogether, casting her as a drunk, a liar and a hermaphrodite.
…

For all executive producer David Milch’s claims for its veracity, HBO’s Deadwood got Jane wrong: She wasn’t an idle drunk in buckskins; rather, she was a dance hall girl in the early days of E.A. Swearingen’s Gem saloon, which was, at the time, a lumber and canvas construction where three women and a man dressed as a woman entertained customers. A Deadwood bartender claimed Swearingen sent Canary to “white slave” for him in Sidney, Neb., and that she brought back 10 girls she’d lured with stories of the vast wealth in the region. …

A couple of key quotations:

“Canary was the Courtney Love of her day”

“She was a good woman [,] only she drinked.”

Read more from Powell’s.

The Gadsden Purchase

… was signed by James Gadsden, U.S. Minister to Mexico, and General Antonio López de Santa Anna, President of Mexico, in Mexico City on this date in 1853. The treaty settled the dispute over the exact location of the Mexican border west of Texas and gave the U.S. approximately 29,000 square miles of land in what is now southern New Mexico and Arizona for the price of $10 million.

The Mexican Republic agrees to designate the following as her true limits with the United States for the future: retaining the same dividing line between the two Californias as already defined and established, according to the 5th article of the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, the limits between the two republics shall be as follows: Beginning in the Gulf of Mexico, three leagues from land, opposite the mouth of the Rio Grande, as provided in the 5th article of the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo; thence, as defined in the said article, up the middle of that river to the point where the parallel of 31 47′ north latitude crosses the same; thence due west one hundred miles; thence south to the parallel of 31º 20′ north latitude; thence along the said parallel of 31º 20′ to the 111th meridian of longitude west of Greenwich; thence in a straight line to a point on the Colorado River twenty English miles below the junction of the Gila and Colorado rivers; thence up the middle of the said river Colorado until it intersects the present line between the United States and Mexico.

Read the entire Gadsden Purchase Treaty.

Wounded Knee

The following is from The Library of Congress, posted on the Today in History page for this date last year, but not available this year:

On December 29, 1890 at Wounded Knee Creek, on the Pine Ridge Reservation, South Dakota, some 500 soldiers of the United States Seventh Cavalry opened fire on approximately 350 Lakota (Sioux) Indians of Chief Big Foot’s Miniconjou band. At the end of the confrontation, between 150 and 300 Sioux men, women, and children, including Chief Big Foot, were dead. This event marked the end of Lakota resistance until the 1970s. Apart from the few minor skirmishes that followed, the Wounded Knee massacre ended the Indian Wars.

In many ways, the massacre resulted from the Ghost Dance movement. The movement was led by a Paiute named Wovoka who claimed to have had a vision that the “Old Earth” would be destroyed and a new one created in which Native Americans could live as they had before the coming of the European. He preached that the only way to survive the impending apocalypse would be to faithfully perform the Ghost Dance and the ceremonies associated with it.

Continue reading Wounded Knee

The Federal Reserve System

… was created by the Owen-Glass Act, signed by President Wilson on this date in 1913. No, Alan Greenspan has not been Chairman of the Federal Reserve ever since, only from 1987.

Gift for President Lincoln

Savannah, Ga., Dec. 22. [1864]

To His Excellency, President Lincoln:

I beg to present you as a Christmas gift, the city of Savannah, with one hundred and fifty heavy guns and plenty of ammunition, and also about twenty-five thousand bales of cotton.

(Signed.) W. T. Sherman, Major-General

The headline in The New York Times the following day read: Savannah Ours.

Solstice

The solstice — “sun still” — is Wednesday at 11:35 AM MST.

In the northern hemisphere, today is the Winter Solstice, the shortest day of the year and the longest night. It’s officially the first day of winter and one of the oldest known holidays in human history. Anthropologists believe that solstice celebrations go back at least 30,000 years, before humans even began farming on a large scale. The stone circles of Stonehenge were arranged to receive the first rays of midwinter sun.

Ancient peoples believed that because daylight was waning, it might go away forever, so they lit huge bonfires to tempt the sun to come back. The tradition of decorating our houses and our trees with lights at this time of year is passed down from those ancient bonfires.

In Ancient Rome, the winter solstice was celebrated with the festival of Saturnalia, during which all business transactions and even war were suspended, and slaves were waited upon by their masters.

The Writer’s Almanac

Astronomically, the solstice is the moment when the sun reaches its most northerly (June) or southerly (December) point in the sky.

The Astronomy Picture of the Day has a nice illustration of Sunrise by Season.

Louisiana Territory

The French colors were lowered and the American flag raised in New Orleans on this date in 1803, signifying the transfer of sovereignty of Louisiana from France to the United States. Arguably the transfer was one of the two or three most defining moments in American history.

As ultimately defined, Louisiana Territory included most of the U.S. west of the Mississippi River, east of the Rocky Mountains, except for Texas and New Mexico; that is, parts or all of Louisiana, Arkansas, Missouri, Iowa, Minnesota, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, South Dakota, North Dakota, Colorado, Wyoming and Montana.

It was on this date

… in 1865 that the 13th amendment to the U.S. Constitution was officially adopted.

Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

Just 140 years ago.

Aviators

Orville and Wilbur Wright successfully made the first four sustained flights of a heavier-than-air machine under the complete control of the pilot at Kill Devil Hills, North Carolina, on this date 102 years ago.

The most prominent man attempting to build an airplane at the time was the third Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, Samuel Langley. He had been studying aeronautics since 1886, and by 1899 he had a large endowment from the U.S. War Department and an entire staff of workers building his design.

One of the problems with Langley’s design, however, was that his plane lacked an ability to steer. He made two test flights in the fall of 1903, and in both cases his plane went straight up and then crashed straight back down. His test flights were covered by all the major newspapers of the day, and such disastrous failure made it seem that motor-powered flight might never be achieved.

The Wright Brothers, by contrast, had believed from the start that steering and balance were the most important aspects of flight. They ran a bicycle shop, so they understood the importance of balance, and they designed their plane to be steered by the pilot shifting his own weight. They began testing gliders with their steering system in 1900, and it was almost as an afterthought that they decided to add an engine.

The Writer’s Almanac, which has more.

Ignorant and wrong

Asked by Boston radio personality Howie Carr about Howard Dean’s recent prediction that the U.S. would lose the war in Iraq, Fox’s Chris Wallace replied:

“We are in a war. We do have 150,000-plus American soldiers over there. I mean, it’s Tokyo Rose, for God sakes, going on radio saying we can’t win the war.”

Hello, Chris, Tokyo Rose is folklore. There was no such person (or personality) known as Tokyo Rose. It was a name created wholly by American GIs.

After the War, one American woman was tried for working for Japanese radio: Iva Toguri D’Aquino. She became known as “Tokyo Rose,” but her actual on-air name was “Orphan Ann.” Ignorant, biased fools like Chris Wallace were working for the news media after World War II, as well as now, and they helped railroad Mrs. D’Aquino into a conviction for treason. She was eventually granted a full pardon by President Ford — after a 60 Minutes report.

Thanks to Digby for the pointer. He provides this link for more info on Iva Toguri.

Jeanette Rankin

… cast the sole vote in Congress against the U.S. declaration of war on Japan on this date in 1941. In 1917, she also voted against entry into World War I.

When elected in 1916, Rankin was the first woman member of the U.S. House of Representatives. She was not re-elected in 1918, after voting against entry in the First World War, but was returned to Congress for one term in 1940.

Jeanette Rankin was a social worker and a lobbyist for peace and women’s rights. She died just before her 93rd birthday in 1973. She is one of the two Montanans honored in The National Statuary Hall Collection of the U.S. Capitol.

ΦBK

On December 5, 1776, Phi Beta Kappa, America’s most prestigious undergraduate honor society, was founded at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia. Membership in the organization is based on outstanding achievement in the liberal arts and sciences and typically limited to students in the upper tenth of their graduating class.

Organized by a group of enterprising undergraduates, Phi Beta Kappa was the nation’s first Greek letter society. From 1776 to 1780, members met regularly at William and Mary to write, debate, and socialize. They also planned the organization’s expansion and established the characteristics typical of American fraternities and sororities: an oath of secrecy, a code of laws, mottoes in Greek and Latin, and an elaborate initiation ritual. When the Revolutionary War forced William and Mary to close in 1780, newly-formed chapters at Harvard and Yale directed Phi Beta Kappa’s growth and development.

By the time the William and Mary chapter reopened in 1851, Phi Beta Kappa was represented at colleges throughout New England. By the end of the nineteenth century, the once secretive, exclusively male social group had dropped its oath of secrecy, opened its doors to women, and transformed itself into a national honor society dedicated to fostering and recognizing excellence in the liberal arts and sciences.

Today, Phi Beta Kappa has over 250 chapters and over half a million living members, including six of the current Supreme Court justices and presidents George Bush and Bill Clinton. In addition to sponsoring scholarships and campus activities, Phi Beta Kappa grants book and essay awards, and publishes The American Scholar, a quarterly journal named after Ralph Waldo Emerson’s 1937 Harvard lecture warning against pedantry, imitation, traditionalism, and scholarship unrelated to life.

Today in History: Library of Congress

Illinois

Corruption of iliniwek (“tribe of the superior men”), natives of region at time of earliest French explorations.

Nickname: Prairie State.
Capital: Springfield.
Entered union: Dec. 3, 1818 (21st).
Slogan: “Land of Lincoln.”
Animal: White-tailed deer.
Bird: Cardinal.
Flower: Violet.
Insect: Monarch butterfly.
Mineral: Fluorite.
Song: “Illinois.”
Tree: White oak.

Illinois Route 66 Plate

Highest point: Charles Mound 1,235′
Lowest point: Mississippi River, Alexander Co. 279′

Total area: 57,914 sq. mi (25th), incl. 2,331 sq. mi. inland water.
Population: 12,600,620 (5th) (July, 2002 est.).

On this date

  • Illinois was admitted to the Union as the 21st state on this date in 1818.
  • George B. McClellan was born on this date in 1826. McClellan was the commander of Union forces in the east during much of the first two years of the War of the Rebellion. He loved to organize and feared to fight. McClellan was the unsuccessful Democratic candidate for President in 1864, receiving 21 to Lincoln’s 212 electoral votes.
  • Jozef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski was born on this date in 1857. Born in the Ukraine of Polish descent, Joseph Conrad learned English in the British merchant marine in his twenties. He began writing in the 1890s and published his first novel, Almayer’s Folly, in 1895. Lord Jim (1900) and Heart of Darkness (1902) are his most famous works.
  • The first human heart transplant took place in Cape Town, South Africa, on this date 38 years ago (1967). The patient, Lewis Washkansky, survived 18 days before he died from double pneumonia, a result of anti-rejection drugs suppressing his immune system.

Daryl Hannah is 45 today.

Brendan Fraser is 37.

Philadelphia nurse overhears British plans to attack Washington

Legend has it that on the night of December 2, 1777, Philadelphia housewife and nurse Lydia Darragh single-handedly saves the lives of General George Washington and his Continental Army when she overhears the British planning a surprise attack on Washington’s army for the following day.

During the occupation of Philadelphia, British General William Howe stationed his headquarters across the street from the Darragh home, and when Howe’s headquarters proved too small to hold meetings, he commandeered a large upstairs room in the Darraghs’ house. Although uncorroborated, family legend holds that Mrs. Darragh would eavesdrop and take notes on the British meetings from an adjoining room and would conceal the notes by sewing them into her coat before passing them onto American troops stationed outside the city.

On the evening of December 2, 1777, Darragh overheard the British commanders planning a surprise attack on Washington’s army at Whitemarsh, Pennsylvania, for December 4 and 5. Using a cover story that she needed to buy flour from a nearby mill just outside the British line, Darragh passed the information to American Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Craig the following day.

The British marched towards Whitemarsh on the evening of December 4, 1777, and were surprised to find General Washington and the Continental Army waiting for them. After three inconclusive days of skirmishing, General Howe chose to return his troops to Philadelphia.

It is said that members of the Central Intelligence Agency still tell the story of Lydia Darragh, one of the first spies in American history.

This Day in History from the History Channel

‘I never wanted to kill anybody, but if a man had it in his mind to kill me, I made it my business to get him first.’

The History Channel tells the fascinating story of Elfego Baca for This Day in Old West History — December 1, 1884:

Elfego Baca, legendary defender of southwestern Hispanos, manages to hold off a gang of 80 cowboys who are determined to kill him.

The trouble began the previous day, when Baca arrested Charles McCarthy, a cowboy who fired five shots at him in a Frisco (now Reserve), New Mexico, saloon. For months, a vicious band of Texan cowboys had terrorized the Hispanos of Frisco, brutally castrating one young Mexican man and using another for target practice. Outraged by these abuses, Baca gained a commission as deputy sheriff to try to end the terror. His arrest of McCarthy served notice to other Anglo cowboys that further abuses of the Hispanos would not be tolerated.

The Texans, however, were not easily intimidated. The morning after McCarthy’s arrest, a group of about 80 cowboys rode into town to free McCarthy and make an example of Baca for all Mexicans. Baca gathered the women and children of the town in a church for their safety and prepared to make a stand. When he saw how outnumbered he was, Baca retreated to an adobe house, where he killed one attacker and wounded several others. The irate cowboys peppered Baca’s tiny hideout with bullets, firing about 400 rounds into the flimsy structure. As night fell, they assumed they had killed the defiant deputy sheriff, but the next morning they awoke to the smell of beef stew and tortillas–Baca was fixing his breakfast.

A short while later, two lawmen and several of Baca’s friends came to his aid, and the cowboys retreated. Baca turned himself over to the officers, and he was charged with the murder of one of the cowboys. In his trial in Albuquerque, the jury found Baca not guilty because he had acted in self-defense, and he was released to a hero’s welcome among the Hispanos of New Mexico. Baca was adored because he had taken a stand against the abusive and racist Anglo newcomers. Hugely popular, Baca later enjoyed a successful career as a lawyer, private detective, and politician in Albuquerque.

Baca was 19 at the time of the shootout and lived until 1945. In 1958, Walt Disney Studios produced The Nine Lives of Elfego Baca. Robert Loggia played the title role, with a cast that included Annette Funicello (as Chiquita), James Coburn and Alan Hale, Jr. (Gilligan’s skipper).

A golf tournament of sorts, the annual Elfego Baca Golf Shoot in Socorro, New Mexico, celebrates the deputy — “competitors are loaded into four-wheel drive vehicles to ascend Socorro Peak, 7,243 feet above sea level. Here they will battle in a one-hole shoot. The hole, a fifty foot patch of dirt, is located on the New Mexico Tech campus, about 4 hours long, 2550 feet down, and almost three miles away.”

You can read more about Elfego Baca here.

[Reposted from December 1, 2003.]

Fifty years ago today

As told by the Library of Congress:

On the evening of December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks, an African American, was arrested for disobeying an Alabama law requiring black passengers to relinquish seats to white passengers when the bus was full. Blacks were also required to sit at the back of the bus. Her arrest sparked a 381-day boycott of the Montgomery bus system and led to a 1956 Supreme Court decision banning segregation on public transportation.

Although her arrest was not “planned,” Park’s action was consistent with the NAACP’s desire to challenge segregated public transport in the courts. A one-day bus boycott coinciding with Parks’s December 5 court date resulted in an overwhelming African American boycott of the bus system. Since black people constituted seventy percent of the transit system’s riders, most busses carried few passengers that day.

Success demanded sustained action. Religious and political leaders met at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church and formed the Montgomery Improvement Association (later the Southern Christian Leadership Conference) and Dexter’s new pastor, Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., was appointed the group’s leader. For the next year, the Montgomery Improvement Association coordinated the bus boycott and the eloquent young preacher inspired those who refused to ride:

If we are wrong—the Supreme Court of this nation is wrong. If we are wrong—God almighty is wrong! If we are wrong—Jesus of Nazareth was merely a utopian dreamer and never came down to earth. If we are wrong—justice is a lie. And we are determined here in Montgomery to work and fight until justice runs down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream.
Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., Montgomery, Alabama, 1955.

The Grand Old Opry

… began broadcasting on this date in 1925.

At 8 p.m. on November 28, 1925, Hay pronounced himself “The Solemn Old Judge” (though he was actually only 30 years old) and launched, along with championship fiddler, Uncle Jimmy Thompson, what would become the WSM Barn Dance.

Hay’s weekly broadcasts continued and proved enormously popular, and he renamed the show the Grand Ole Opry in 1927. Crowds soon clogged hallways as they gathered to observe the performers, prompting the National Life company to build an acoustically designed auditorium capable of holding 500 fans. When WSM radio increased broadcasting power to 50,000 watts in 1932, most of the United States and parts of Canada could tune into the Opry on Saturday nights, broadening the show’s outreach. …

The Opry went through a number of homes in several parts of Nashville before settling, in 1943, at the Ryman Auditorium, a former religious meeting house built in 1892….

Grand Ole Opry: Introduction

Washita

The surprise attack on Black Kettle’s village of Southern Cheyenne at the Washita River in Indian Territory (now western Oklahoma) took place on this date in 1868.

Just before midnight, they crawled to the edge of a bluff which overlooked a river valley. One of the scouts announced he could smell smoke. The other heard a dog bark. Custer could not see anything, and he did not smell smoke or hear the dog. But in the quiet moments of listening, he heard a baby cry. He had found his Indians.

Custer divided his command into four detachments, which would surround the village, north, south, east, and west, and wait for dawn. On his command, they would charge from the four directions.

At first light, Custer turned to the band leader and directed him “to give us ‘Garry Owen’ [his favorite song]. At once the rollicking notes of that familiar marching and fighting air sounded forth through the valley, and in a moment were re-echoed back from the opposite sides by the loud and continued cheers of the men of the other detachments, who, true to their orders, were there and in readiness to pounce upon the Indians the moment the attack began. In this manner the battle of the Washita commenced.”

The “battle” in the village was short, barely fifteen minutes. The soldiers drove the people from their lodges barefoot and half naked, shooting them in the open. Many of the warriors managed to reach the trees, where they began to return fire; a few of them escaped, but after a couple of hours, the firing ceased and 103 Cheyennes lay dead in the snow and mud. Custer reported that they were fighting men, but others said that ninety-two of them were women, children, and old people. Black Kettle, the sixty-seven-year-old leader of the band, and his wife, Medicine Woman Later, who had survived nine gunshot wounds at the Massacre of Sand Creek four years before, had been shot in the back as they attempted to cross the Lodge Pole or Washita River. Their bodies, trampled and covered with mud, were found in the shallow water by the survivors.

The soldiers seized everything in the village—guns, bows and arrows, decorated clothing, sacred shields, tobacco, dried meat, dried berries, robes, and fifty-one lodges—and burned it. In addition, they captured 875 horses and mules. Custer gave the order to slaughter these animals by cutting their throats, but the horses feared whiteman smell and shied away, and after several attempts, the men grew tired. Custer gave the order to shoot the animals instead. Custer himself slaughtered camp dogs. Then the 7th Cavalry took its captives, mostly women and children and old ones, and headed north to its base of operations, Camp Supply.

Excerpt from Killing Custer by James Welch

Santa Catalina Island

… was named in honor of Saint Catherine of Alexandria by Sebastián Vizcaíno on this date in 1602, her feast day. The indigenous Pimungan called their island Pimu.

In 310, Emperor Maximus ordered Catherine broken on the wheel for being a Christian, but she touched the wheel and it was destroyed. She was beheaded, and her body whisked away by angels.

According to The Catholic Community Forum, Saint Catherine is the patron saint of “apologists, craftsmen who work with a wheel (potters, spinners, etc.), archivists, attornies, barristers, dying people, educators, girls, jurists, knife grinders, knife sharpeners, lawyers, librarians, libraries, maidens, mechanics, millers, nurses, old maids, philosophers, potters, preachers, scholars, schoolchildren, scribes, secretaries spinners, spinsters, stenographers, students, tanners, teachers, theologians, turners, unmarried girls, wheelwrights.”

Twenty-six miles across the sea
Santa Catalina is a-waitin’ for me
Santa Catalina, the island of romance
Romance, romance, romance

Water all around it everywhere
Tropical trees and the salty air
But for me the thing that’s a-waitin’ there, romance

Visit Catalina Island’s Official Website.

The Pilgrims

Our harvest being gotten in, our governor sent four men on fowling, that so we might after have 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.

From the only contemporary account of the Pilgrims’ first Thanksgiving, a letter by Edward Winslow dated December 11, 1621.