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For almost Fifty years I like most Americans believed our Thanksgiving Story. You know the one.

The Pilgrim fathers miraculously settled an inhospitable land, bravely persevered, hosted the First Thanksgiving and ultimately were responsible for planting the seeds of Liberty which eventually grew into our Nation. What bunk!

The Thanksgiving story that we have all been taught, like all Yankee historical fiction, contains just enough truth to allow an unsuspecting public to swallow the entire story. Sure, it seems harmless enough. By all means, a Christian nation should set aside one day a year to thank God Almighty for his Grace and Bounty. My family and I thank God daily and enjoy giving thanks annually for the wonderful land Our Father in Heaven has seen fit to provide. My friends we are in perilous times and a chief reason for our peril is the steady diet of Yankee historical fiction fed to an unsuspecting citizenry through government schools and media propaganda. If you have no idea where we’ve been as a Nation you will have less of an idea of where we are headed. This is the purpose of historical fiction.

The Pilgrims who landed in the new world at Plymouth in 1619 actually arrived at the Colony of Virginia. In honor of Elizabeth I, the virgin Queen, Sir Walter Raleigh established the English legal presence. Operating under a charter from the Queen to take possession of all the land between the 33° and 45° north latitude on the coast of North America he took possession and named the whole country covered under the patent, Virginia. This was essentially accomplished between 1578 to 1587.

In 1606 King James I of England divided Virginia into two districts. North Virginia from the mouth of the Hudson River to Newfoundland and South Virginia from the mouth of the Potomac to Cape Fear. The territory between was to be neutral ground on which companies might develop settlements no closer than fifty miles from the respective borders.

Now the first successful colony in America was Jamestown in Virginia in 1607. Its success can be attributed in no small way to Captain John Smith, an English mercenary who had himself spent some years as a slave of theTymor of Nalbritz in the area of the Sea of Azof. Upon landing on the shores of Virginia the new arrivals immediately built a church for the purpose of giving thanks. Doubtless these Christian folk frequently met to give thanks in the weeks, months and years of hardship that followed.

The first representative legislative body to form on the continent was the Assembly that met in Jamestown, Virginia on the 19^th of June, 1619. In September of that same year a group of settlers were dispatched to found a new colony at Berkley Hundred which is up the James River from Jamestown. They were issued explicit instructions "that the day of our ship’s arrival at the place assigned for plantation in the land of Virginia shall be yearly and perpetually kept holy as a day of Thanksgiving to Almighty God." This obligation was fulfilled in December of 1619 and to this day festivities occur annually at Berkeley Plantation to commemorate the event. This was one full year before the Pilgrims arrived at Plymouth and two years before they thought to give thanks for it. One hundred and one Pilgrims landed at Plymouth on the 22^nd of December, 1620, and this at a time when Jamestown enjoyed a representative legislature and a population of nearly two thousand. By April 1, 1621 all but 46 of the 101 had died.

Alexander H. Stephens (1812 – 1883) has been called "one of the most gifted Constitutional scholars this country has ever produced." He was a Georgia Lawyer, state legislator and member of the US House of Representatives. Despite his strong belief in states’ rights he was a firm supporter of the Union and in 1872 published his History of the United States. In that History Stephens states "The name Puritan was given to them on account of their austerity of manner and the rigid observance of the forms of their religion, …and in the language of Maculay, Persecution produced its natural effect on them. It found them a sect, it made them a faction. To their hatred of the church was now added hatred of the crown. The two sentiments were intermingled, and each embittered the other…After the fashion of opressed sects, they mistook their own vindictive feelings for emotions of piety; encouraged in themselves, by reading and meditation, a disposition to brood over their wrongs; and, when they had worked themselves up into hating their enemies, imagined that they were only hating the enemies of heaven….The extreme Puritan was at once known from other men by his gait, his garb, his lank hair, the sour solemnity of his face, the upturned white of his eyes, the nasal twang with which he spoke, and, above all, by his peculiar dialect."

Much has been made of the severity of the conditions that the Pilgrims endured with little reference to the fact that every single settlement forced bravery and sacrifice to survive. The meager harvests and subsequent rescue from starvation would not have been necessary had not the Pilgrim fathers saw fit to declare their company a community with all property communal. Good grief, they were planting seeds of socialism on the North American Continent and were saved a slow death by the largesse of the Indians who felt genuine pity for their circumstance. A pity those same Indians would live to regret. To quote Stephens again in his History, "The harvest of 1622 was scanty, and the settlers would have suffered greatly had it not been for the friendship of the Indians. One of the causes of the scarcity was…to have a community of property. But even amongst the Puritans there were some who would not work, as long as they were permitted to eat the fruit of the labor of others. And so the system was changed, and, in the spring of 1623, each family had allotted a parcel of ground to cultivate for itself. All had now to work for themselves, or to do without. After the harvest of that year there was never any general want of food." By 1631, under various charters granted by King James I, and later his son, King Charles I, the Massachusetts colony was established.

By the late 1630’s the Colonies of Plymouth, Massachusetts Bay, New Hampshire and Connecticut were firmly established. New settlements and towns were erected and large numbers of immigrants arrived from England, principally Puritans. War erupted in early in 1637 between the Pequod Indians and the Puritans. The Indians lost and about two hundred women and children were taken prisoner. Those who were not reduced to slavery by the Puritan fathers were sent to the West Indies and sold into slavery for life. Thus the Pequod Tribe was exterminated.

In 1636 the Pilgrim fathers built in Marblehead, Massachusetts, the first American slave ship; it was christened the Desire and intended to bring them profit from the African slave trade. The Desire’s first successful enterprise brought into Massachusetts its cargo of human misery on May 20, 1638. According to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, "The harshness of rule, narrow-mindedness and self-satisfaction, which became characteristic of the Massachusetts colony, cannot be ascribed wholly to Puritanism. Much of it was motivated by a desire for profit."

To satisfy their desire for more power and profit the Pilgrim Fathers founded the first Confederation of States on the North American continent. Called "United Colonies of New England" they sought to spread their influence completely and absolutely among their brethren. Hanging, burning at the stake, branding and whipping were cruel commonplace practices against those who thought differently. Indeed in 1637 they caused to be listed 82 blasphemous, erroneous or unsafe opinions (emphasis mine) held in the colony. All this before the "Witch Trials" and reign of bloody terror that awaited innocent citizens.

So, the grain of truth is that the sympathetic Indians helped the would-be Marxists survive a winter. Investigate any sacred Yankee myth and you will uncover a cesspool of greed, corruption and evil crowned with an innocent ideal intended to obfuscate. Once you swallow the grain of truth and make it your own, you will not see or you will overlook the cesspool. The whole purpose of maleducating (the prefix mal meaning defective) an unsuspecting citizenry is to assure that they hold only approved opinion and are thus more easily led. Gee, I wonder what other yarns Yankee historians have spun?

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