While our modern gladiators chase a pigskin across fields in Detroit, Dallas and Minneapolis and Minneapolis, we settle down in our homes to loosen our belts, and remind our kids that of the day when we recite the gratitude of the Pilgrims who came together in 1621’s fall for the celebration of their first plentiful harvest in the new land.
The Pilgrims their initial winters in the New World had been a brutal one. The wheat they brought to plant wouldn’t thrive in the hard New England soil. About half of the colonists perished.
However, there was more than these unexpected challenges. The author of his “History of the Plymouth Plantation” Governor of Plymouth, William Bradford, reported that the colonists were hungry due to their refusal to do work in fields, and preferred to shop for food. Gov. Bradford remembered for posterity that the colony was plagued by “corruption as well as discontent.”
While at the harvest celebrations in 1621-1622 “all had their stomachs filled” this relief was not long-lasting and the deaths of illness caused by malnutrition continued.
And then, Richard J. Marbury writes in his November 1985 article published in The Free Market, “something changed.” By harvest time, 1623, Gov. Bradford was writing that “Instead of famine, God gave them plenty and the whole world changed, to the joy of the hearts of a lot of people and they praised God.”
What did on Earth was going on?
In 1623, Gov. Bradford simply “gave every household a piece of land and said they could keep the land they produced, or sell it off according to their own discretion.”
Prior to that it was prior to the Mayflower Compact, Mayflower Compact had required that “all gains and gains derived from working, trade or fishing, or by any other method” were to be put into the common stocks that the colony. The person was required to place into the stock of the common stock everything possible and withdraw only what he required -an idea that was so appealing in its appearance that it would soon be used as the disastrous principle for the entire region in Eastern Europe some 300 years after.
It is true that America can be a thriving country, but the source of our bounty isn’t solely in the fertileness of our soil or in the regularity of the rains. The source of our abundance is that discovery of the Pilgrims in 1623. when individuals are permitted to own their land, to eat the food they can and retain the profits of any surplus they make, their effort is rewarded which is why all of the people in the community benefit from prosperity and abundance.
So, during this Thanksgiving Day we ask God’s for his continued blessings on America as the world’s most sought-after destination America, the home of the free.
