Did the First Thanksgiving Involve the Word “Thanksgiving”?

As historians have noted, the first thanksgiving ceremony held by English colonists in America was not that of the Plymouth Rock pilgrims commemorated by this week’s holiday. It was conducted nearly two years earlier, and a full year before the Pilgrims landed on the Massachusetts coast, by the 36 settlers aboard the ship Margaret who set sail for Virginia from the English port of Bristol in September 1619 under the command of Captain John Woodlief. Woodlief had instructions from the Berkeley Company, which underwrote the venture, to offer a prayer of thanks upon landing, and the first thing he did when his group came ashore near Jamestown on December 4 was to have it kneel and pray, after which he declared: “We ordain that this day of our ship’s arrival at the place assigned for [a] plantation in the land of Virginia shall be yearly and perpetually kept holy as a day of Thanksgiving to Almighty God.”

By way of contrast, there is no evidence that the Plymouth colonists accorded their 1621 harvest celebration any such historical significance, or that they even used the word “thanksgiving” to describe it. Could the name Thanksgiving have been transferred by subsequent generations from the Virginia prayer to the New England banquet, whose participants never referred to it in such a manner? I think it might have been.

The word “thanksgiving” itself, as opposed to the phrase “giving thanks,” was fairly new in 1619–21. It seems to have first entered the English language, or at least been popularized, through the 1538 Coverdale Bible, the completed version, undertaken by the English cleric Myles Coverdale, of the unfinished translation of William Tyndale, who was burned at the stake in what is now Belgium for heresy by the Catholic Church in 1536. (Both Tyndale and Coverdale were early Protestant reformers who fled England before Henry VIII swung it into the Protestant camp.) Among the parts of the Bible left untranslated by Tyndale was the book of Psalms, in which Coverdale used “thanksgiving” twice, once in the 40th and once in the 100th Psalm.