Recent early American scholarship has worked to underscore the violence and privation that attended the English settlement of New England, in Plymouth and beyond, for settlers and native Americans alike. Outside of early American scholarship, it is a different story. If once we celebrated Thanksgiving because of the Pilgrims, we now celebrate the Pilgrims because of Thanksgiving. The (somewhat sketchy) Pilgrim origins of Thanksgiving commemorate a brief interlude of relative peace and plenty for Pilgrims and the native inhabitants of the land they settled. The gathering William Bradford describes in Of Plymouth Plantation is memorable precisely because it marks a departure from the struggle that preceded and followed it. These details have not prevented Thanksgiving from becoming the heart of an orgy of consumption that runs from Halloween to New Year’s. Increasingly, Thanksgiving feels like the undercard to Black Friday, when we gather to endure scenes of chaos and violence in order to get more stuff. The Plymouth that Bernard Bailyn and Kathleen Donegan conjure also reels with chaos and violence, but this story replaces big boxes and big deals with empty larders and empty stomachs.
In the Plymouth chapter of Seasons of Misery (2013), Donegan frames her analysis around a quotation from Plymouth Colony Governor William Bradford: “the living were scarce able to bury their dead.” The portrait she paints is not of buckled shoes and big hats but of starving settlers driven to eating the leather from those shoes. Seasons of Misery is, in Donegan’s words “a study about the unsettling act of colonial settlement, and how English settlers became colonial through the acute bodily experiences and mental ruptures they experienced in their first years on Native American ground.”
In the case of Plymouth, the process of becoming colonial features the display of dead bodies, both English and Indian. The head of the Indian Witawamut, severed from his body by Miles Standish, better known for his role in the courtship of Priscilla Alden, is displayed on a pike in front of the Pilgrim encampment—“the head of one of them stands still on our forte for a terror to others,” wrote William Bradford. The Pilgrims had their own terrors. Facing simultaneous threats of starvation, sickness, and Indian attack, the Pilgrims created a macabre Potemkin village of their brethren. As Phineas Pratt explained, “We asked them wheare the Rest of our friends weare that came in the first ship. Thay said that God had taken them away by deth, & that before thayr second ship came, thay we are so distresed with sickness that thay, feareing the salvages should know it, had sett up theyr sick men with theyr muscits upon thayr Rests & thayr backs Leaning against trees.” This “cadaverous tableau vivant of forest sentinels,” as Donegan calls it, is hard to imagine integrating into our current observations of Thanksgiving, but violence and terror, in Donegan’s account, were the very fabric of Pilgrim settlement.