Though many now see it as a quintessentially American creation, “We Gather Together” actually originated from the religious strife of 16th-century Europe. Following the 1597 Battle of Turnhout, where a Dutch army led by Prince Maurice of Orange defeated Spanish occupying forces in an area now part of Belgium, the poet Adrianus Valerius wrote “Wilt Heden nu Treden” to commemorate the victory, setting the words to an old Dutch folk melody. During the occupation, Dutch Protestants had been barred by the Catholic King Philip II of Spain from meeting with one another for worship. So the gathering together that the song celebrated represented not only the end of religious persecution for the Dutch, but also the reestablishment of sectarian uniformity through the removal of heretical outsiders.
The Pilgrims, who would arrive in Holland shortly after, probably heard the song during their brief time there. But they were unlikely to have brought it with them to Plymouth, as their strict religious practice meant they sang only psalms directly from the Bible. Instead, the song made its way to this continent with the Dutch who settled in New Amsterdam in the early 1600s, becoming a cherished hymn that generations of Dutch Americans in the Midwest passed down through the centuries and still sung in their native tongue.
The song’s English version—and its connection to Thanksgiving—came from Theodore Baker, an American music scholar who encountered its German translation while studying at the University of Leipzig in the 1870s. In 1894, shortly after his return to the United States, Baker translated the hymn into English, naming it “Prayer of Thanksgiving.” Starting in the early 1900s, Christian denominations began to include it in their hymnbooks.
That song’s new title established its association with the holiday, but World War I and, especially, World War II secured its popularity. Where the hymn’s mention of “the wicked oppressing” referred to the Spanish Catholics in the original Dutch version, Americans began to sing it with the threat of German Nazis in mind, as the music scholar Michael Hawn has argued. The song’s request, “O Lord, make us free,” voiced the plea of a country at war. And once victory had been won, the song offered an expression of gratitude while also evoking America’s strongest sense of itself as God’s chosen nation: “Sing praises to His name, He forgets not his own.”
Born out of a 16th-century battle and finding its permanent cultural status in 20th-century U.S. conflicts, the hymn has connections to war that mirror Thanksgiving’s own link to military strife. While Americans remember the original 1621 Thanksgiving (of which there exists only two primary-source accounts) in their celebrations each year, most have forgotten that it was the Civil War that led to the official holiday. With a country torn apart, President Abraham Lincoln had declared the last Thursday of November in 1863 “as a day of thanksgiving and praise” to promote unity. But his proclamation acknowledged that it would take the “advancing armies and navies of the Union” and a conquered Confederacy to bind the nation together again.