"Being thus arrived in a good harbour and brought safe to land,
"they fell upon their knees and blessed God who had brought them over the furious ocean
"and delivered them from all the perils thereof,
"again to set their feet on the firm and stable earth, their proper element."
London at the start of the 17th century may have looked imposing, but it was a sombre capital.
Civil war was not far away. Religious dissenters went in fear of their faith and their heads.
"I shall make them conform," said King James, "or I shall harry them out of the land."
So both adventurers and nonconformists began to look to America as a safer home from home.
The first English settlers didn't start for America from anywhere so grand as this,
but they most likely wouldn't have made it if it hadn't been for an institution like this.
We are in the hall of the Middle Temple in London.
This was put up as a new building at the end of the 16th century
as a sort of combination finishing school, law school, establishment club and think tank.
It was the gathering place of the men who had the power and the influence at court
and the money to back the American venture.
Sir Walter Raleigh was a member here. It didn't do him much good.
He was in disfavour at the time and was allowed out of prison on a promise to the crown
that he'd go to America and find a gold mine.
He didn't, so he obediently came home and had his head chopped off.
It was here that Francis Drake was honoured after his three-year voyage around the world.
Now, he'd sacked the cities of Chile and Peru,
and he came back with so much altar plate and golden crucifixes
that his ship, the Golden Hind, could barely list into port.
And for this feat of "seamanship" and piracy,
he was made a knight and a member of the Middle Temple.
This bit of buccaneering started a legend going through England,
not only among adventurers, but among slum dwellers and pinching farmers.
Quite ordinary folk got the impression of America
as a land veined with gold and blazing with precious stones.
A geographer who'd never been west of Bristol described it as "a land of unknown greatness".
Ben Jonson wrote a play in which a sea captain, who'd also never been there,
said it was a land where Indian maidens laid treasure at your feet.
"Man," he said - and he DID say "man" -
"their very dripping pans and chamber pots are made of purest gold."
The substantial men who financed the colonies were not bemused by such fantasies,
but they did foresee the prospect of a breathtaking investment
in a country which, unlike their own, had unbounded virgin land.
Now, all newly-discovered lands belonged automatically to the king, James the First.
The sponsors of this enterprise had to procure from him a charter as a trading company
which would plant a colony in Virginia.
It would be run from London by a council approved by the crown
and its disputes would be settled by the English courts.
So in 1606, three ships set sail on a journey that would take, at best, two months.
# You gentlemen of England that live at home at ease
# How little do you think upon the danger of the seas
# Now mounted on the topmast how dreadful 'tis below
# Then we ride as the tide when the stormy winds do blow #
They were to settle north of the Spanish in Florida and south of the French in Canada.
Of the 145 who sailed, 16 died on the way,
and the rest landed here, moored to the trees in six fathoms off a wooded island
which they named after the King, Jamestown.
This is what they found. A flat, malarial swamp on the edge of endless, dense forest.
They'd been taken in by promotional literature
which advertised, as always, a paradise somewhere else.
They were hard-bitten types, mostly. Seamen, adventurers, slum people, convicts.
That's misleading. If you were crazy to get to America, you could steal a rabbit or a cloak,
do a six-month stretch and get shipped away.
Despite their dank and dull surroundings,
they were still fired by the promise of the gold from those fabulous mines.
But they hadn't the ghost of an idea of the first rule of settlement,
to be self-sustaining.
They lived off the supplies they brought over, and they exhausted them in seven months.
They bartered with Indians for food and land. To them, it was part of their legal contract.
From the Indian point of view, it was theft.
So now it became dangerous to forage in the interior woods, even for lumber.
Shiftless as ever, they actually chopped down their houses for firewood.
Well, they found a leader in Captain John Smith, or, rather, he made himself one.
He didn't have a central plan either,
but he had the horse sense to see that the new country was nothing like the Spaniards' vision
and nothing like England, either.
He forced everyone to work on pain of being thrown out beyond the stockade
and taking a chance with starvation or with the now hostile Indians.
John Smith had announced a very simple and startling rule of life
which didn't spread to all classes in Europe until, really, the end of the Second World War.
It was a sentence that rooted itself early and deep in the American consciousness
and made Americans distrustful of inherited wealth,
and the lucky ones even uncomfortable about living off trust funds.
Uncomfortable for the first year or two, anyway.
The sentence was, "He that will not work, neither shall he eat."
But they still didn't think of a subsistence crop.
They made pitch and tar, and Smith rehoused the population by making them split timber.
They planted on 40-acre lots,
but the marshlands and the searing summers produced more mosquitoes than English crops.
Their salvation came to them from an Indian crop that grew here like dandelions. Tobacco.
# Tobacco! Tobacco!
# Sing sweetly for tobacco
# Tobacco is like love
# All love it
# For, you see, I will prove it
# Love makes men sail from shore to shore
# So doth tobacco
# 'Tis fond love often makes men poor
# So doth tobacco... #
It was of poor quality, but cheap to grow.
They found that the flavour was improved if, instead of throwing it on the ground to dry,
they cured it by racking it up in smoke houses.
Graded by hand, it soon approached the purity of the Spanish tobacco
the English had insisted on when the smoking fashion came in.
Even in the Second World War, when transatlantic shipping was imperilled,
the English refused to give up their Virginia tobacco.
Within ten years, the London Company was beginning to appreciate
that a very different little England was in the making 3,000 miles away.
They began to send over fewer of the types
about which several colonial governors had complained,
namely "gentlemen unused to work, gallants and lascivious sons".
Now, small landowners were arriving, bringing with them good labourers and servants.
They moved out of their stockade to better land, built houses of brick, a hospital and a church.
The original of the church on this site is not very celebrated in the history books,
but it's the place where popular representative government began in the New World.
The London Company decided that the colony was failing to rule itself.
The London Company was going bankrupt. They were in debt to the tune of £75,000.
So they got permission from the King's Council to send a governor as a single absolute ruler.
They had a succession of them, most of them severe but able.
And then, in 1619, the colony had the great good luck
to get a lazy, inefficient, bewildered governor, Sir George Yeardley.
However, he was a kindly man,
and he broke down and admitted he couldn't rule all the boroughs and plantations,
even by his own local laws.
What does an Englishman do when he has a problem? He forms a committee.
Yeardley was ordered from London to see that two men were selected from each borough
and would come to Jamestown and help him.
Well, they came, 22 of them, in July 1619.
And in midsummer, Virginia can be an inferno.
Most of them were sick. One of them died.
They all suffered from the chronic colonial complaint, dysentery. And they quit in six days.
But in that time they applied the first taxation
by levying ten pounds of tobacco on every able-bodied male over the age of 16.
They enacted a code of local laws to go into force at once.
They called themselves the House of Burgesses.
This is the House of Burgesses, rebuilt to the original design, in Williamsburg, Virginia.
It's usual to look on this place as the first fort of American liberty,
built by blue-eyed patriots screaming to be set free from the tyranny of British rule.
Nothing could be less true.
Here was created the embryo of the American system of a two-house popular assembly,
based on the English Lords and Commons.
It was the first self-governing body in America.
It is the kernel of the state governments and, in time, the Congress of the United States.
This burgess system,
it was not greeted with wild applause either in London or here in Virginia.
In fact, here there were many people who thought of it as a democratical experiment,
and so, highly dangerous.
In fact, it was an expedient, it was a desperate remedy against the all-powerful rule of one man,
namely the governor system, which, we have seen, had broken down.
In the beginning, there were very strict limits on what the burgesses could do.
They were to meet only once a year.
They were to follow and imitate in all things the laws and customs of England.
But in one thing, the London Company gave them a freedom
which was certainly in those days not included in the liberties of Englishmen.
Those 22 delegates, the first burgess men, and the ones who came after,
were to be elected by the inhabitants.
That phrase was never defined. It came to mean every able-bodied male over the age of 16.
Servants, both free and indentured.
Now, in England, you had to be a landowner or a property owner to vote.
But here, a man could arrive as a servant under contract to pay back his passage
and in 15 years own a plantation like this with 5,500 acres.
The social ladder was not steep.
If you were industrious, you too could become one of the first families of Virginia.
By the late 17th century, the system had spread down the long coast of the Carolinas.
And by the 1750s, the plantations there were shipping out small fortunes in rice and indigo.
What was unique about this coast was its wealth of tidal rivers between fingers of fertile land.
An Englishman reported home that "no country in the world can be so curiously watered".
No need for overland transport to harbours. Each landing stage was its own port.
Every lawn was an assembly line.
This topography produced the river plantation, a miniature society, a kingdom in itself.
This is Shirley, which has been in the hands of the same two families for nine generations.
It was acquired by the son of this patriarch, himself a first-generation American,
Robert, known as "King" Carter for his wealth, his cunningly-acquired 30,000 acres
and his distrust of "democratical elements".
But "King" Carter was also the Speaker of the House of Burgesses
and the Treasurer of the colony.
The striking difference between these planters and their counterparts in England
was that they did not, on the whole, acquire land and wealth and build houses
and then leave a luxurious living to idle generations.
Virginia became the first state to abolish what Jefferson called the "pernicious law"
whereby the eldest son was the automatic inheritor.
When the elections for burgesses were held,
the planters were the overwhelming choice of the voters of Virginia
because the plantations were miniature colonies
and the men who ran them well felt an equal responsibility for the government of the colony.
So what is ultimately impressive about a family like this, the Carters,
is not its acreage or its wealth,
but the fact that down the generations they produced eight governors of Virginia,
three signers of the Declaration of Independence,
two presidents of the United States, a chief justice
and General Robert E Lee.
The flowering of the tobacco industry set the Southern pattern
of a single, luxuriant cash crop grown on a large plantation
housing a complete society which made everything for its sustenance.
Today you can see how it worked down in South Carolina
at Middleton Plantation, its stable yards and workshops.
An ocean away from repairs,
the first Americans developed their flair for gadgetry and invented the verb "to fix".
You'll notice something which a white audience passes over as an embarrassing detail,
but it was the root of the Southern system.
The heavy labour was black.
Following the Portuguese and Spanish tradition,
the English shipped the first blacks into Virginia 12 years after the settlement.
For years, there were no more than 300. Lowly labour was done by white indentured servants.
But tobacco called for labour battalions and for more drudgery than skill.
When the Virginians needed slavery, they made it legal.
The Royal African Company gave a monopoly of the slave trade to England.
The blacks were shipped in. By the 1680s they were coming in at the rate of 60,000 a decade.
The first moral objections to slavery came from the North,
but they were strangled by the profits of the ship-owners.
Realistic objections came from Southerners terrified of being outnumbered. This passed.
The purchase of human lives was cheap,
whether of black men in the fields of the South or white children in the coal mines of England.
When you can buy a tame population with no say in the terms of its labour,
you've solved all our plaguing problems - unemployment, wages, prices, racial minorities.
On such a base there evolved, in South Carolina more than anywhere,
a spacious society on the model of the English landed gentry.
By the 18th century, up-country planters and merchants could afford cool townhouses
along the waterfront of Charleston, the main port and social centre of the Carolinas.
If the other settlements had been run on the Southern model,
if - it's a very big "if" -
the Northern lands and climate had been amenable to huge, profitable single crops,
there could very well not have been an American Revolution, certainly not an American Civil War.
But the Southern system, with all its virtues and its vices,
did not produce a society so radically independent of Britain
that it would guarantee a steady drift to republicanism.
That was done in another and a ruder place, by sterner men to the north.
These sterner types were the immortal Pilgrims, financed by the Plymouth Company.
They landed in the North not because they chose to, but because of their navigator.
He was meant to land them, too, in Virginia,
where they would plant themselves 100 miles from the London merchants and adventurers.
The Pilgrims were religious dissenters fired by a burning contempt for the Church of England,
though subsidised by a loan of £7,000 to be repaid by the fruit of their labours.
But they missed Virginia by 500 miles or more,
and beached themselves at the end of a long peninsula that curves up into a fish hook.
Cape Cod in Massachusetts.
The Pilgrims are famous for three things.
They sailed on a ship called the Mayflower. They survived the first, hideous winter.
And their Yorkshire leader summarised their character in a memorable sentence.
"Being thus passed over the vast ocean, we had no friends to welcome us,
"no houses, much less towns, to repair to, and some muttered to turn ashore again.
"But we cried unto the Lord and he heard our voice and looked on our adversities."
It's a moving story, and has moved New Englanders to believe that the lush South
was settled by wealthy idlers who turned into statesmen, a race of Thomas Jeffersons,
whereas bleak New England was founded by simple, holy men
who somehow turned into a shrewd bourgeoisie, a population of Calvin Coolidges.
But the Pilgrims were not the true founders of the New England system.
Still back in England were men who would make the departure from the government of England.
They were known as Puritans, and they didn't renounce the Church of England.
They deplored its corruption, its encrustations of liturgy, the sale of livings to cynical men,
and the fear of Popery and new persecutions.
They saw morality gone to seed.
They didn't reject the Church. They felt it had rejected them.
They would go to America, and they would there restore the purity and authority of the Church.
They would build a new England, and a better one.
Now, their unquestioned leader
was a Puritan who defies all the stereotypes of their time and ours.
Not the censorious, self-righteous bigot.
He was named John Winthrop,
and he was to a manor born, and grew up here in Groton in Suffolk.
Now, the manor house itself has gone,
but this house behind me was where he first held court as the lord of the manor
to settle his tenants' grievances.
Winthrop came from a family of wool merchants,
and this new town, Lavenham, was the capital of the woollen trade.
He was a lawyer with court connections.
Why should he leave such a privileged life?
To some extent, he was a subversive. He was a dissenter and he lost his legal practice.
Also, prices were soaring and the rents of his tenants were fixed by law.
So his personal misfortune coincided with his dim view of the Church.
This is the tomb of his parents in the churchyard at Groton.
Winthrop was an absolutely typical Puritan of his time,
with rooted convictions that we don't now associate with Puritanism.
For instance, it was wrong to hunt with a gun if you did not make a profit from the kill.
And all the Puritans felt that it would be an actual sin
to plant a colony in the New World that was not a financial success.
The word "business" has changed. They were men of business, men of affairs, of substance.
That's to say, responsibility.
All substantial Puritans saw no contradiction in putting their money where their faith was.
They believed that man was planted on this earth to use his talents to the full.
Material success was a sign of God's blessing.
And if a man remained poor, it showed that he was shiftless and his poverty was God's curse.
This, I think, tells us a great deal
about the traditional and certainly American distaste for what we now call welfare.
And I think it explains something about America that this man of terrific industry and piety
should have created the model of New England.
To me, it explains at any rate why, 300 years later,
an American president, Calvin Coolidge, could say without the hint of a blush,
"The business of America is business."
Well, with other gentlemen of affairs and learning,
Winthrop secured a royal charter for a company
and he was chosen Governor of the Company of the Massachusetts Bay in New England.
There were two differences to the company that sponsored the settlement of Virginia.
They were crucial. First, the Puritans' religious freedom was guaranteed.
But much more important, this company was not bound to hold its meetings in London.
This meant that the governor of the company could become the governor of the colony
and set up any kind of government he wanted.
This was not entirely an oversight.
The King's Council in London had learned that its experience
fell far short of the whole American experience.
In the year before Winthrop sailed,
their doubts were confirmed by reports of a ferocious Indian massacre.
In March 1630, John Winthrop sailed in the flagship of an expedition
which was much the largest that had gone to the New World.
Not a junket of seamen and footloose younger sons and other seekers after gold,
but what Winthrop always thought of as a noble microcosm of the human family.
His four ships carried over 500 men, women and children leaving England for ever
to set up a city of God.
So he left the inns of court and the manor at Groton,
and lived in a house as simple as this.
There is, in all his journals and his writings,
no smidge of condescension or complaint that it had been a poor exchange.
Of course, in England he was not a powerful man.
He was an active dissenter and a lawyer, a small country squire.
Here he was omnipotent, and from the beginning he laid down the rules of a way of life.
He told an early meeting of settlers why, by his lights, Virginia had failed.
Its main end was carnal, not religious.
It gathered a multitude of rude and misgoverned persons.
And it failed to set up a right form of government.
Well, like most Puritans before and since, Winthrop knew what was right for other people.
And he was here to see that they got it good and hard.
The first meeting houses of the congregations were, like their houses, wooden huts.
But by the 1680s, the people of Hingham, Massachusetts, felt secure enough
to build something as substantial as their faith, and this is it.
The sole survivor of its times. Not a museum, but now the town church.
Today, all denominations come to celebrate Thanksgiving and the Christian festivals.
But in those earlier meeting houses there was only one true faith,
which embraced, and in some cases suffocated, the secular life of the town.
The essence of the Puritan system was the idea that every community, big and small,
was a government in itself, a congregation of God's elect run by God's laws.
And who was to elect God's elect?
Governor John Winthrop and the governing body of clergymen.
The people were allowed to have a say in the government,
but only if they had been certified by each local council as true believers.
So what started out as a trading company organised for profit
turned into a religious dictatorship.
And, looking back on it.
We can see that it does bear a resemblance to a communist or any totalitarian government.
The party will tolerate you, but you have no say in the government if you're not a party member.
Life is very real and very earnest, and you're building a society from the ground up
which cannot be sustained by consent,
but only by the most rigid discipline imposed from on top.
So the rulers direct every function of society.
Work and play and worship and morals and business and literature.
And in this case, usually with admonitions from the Old Testament
interspersed with the thoughts of Chairman Winthrop.
"Work, for the night cometh.
"There shall be no reward to the evil man. The candle of the wicked shall be put out.
"Make with thine own hands all the things that thou needest.
"Whosoever sweepeth a room for the Lord's sake is blessed.
"Instruct thy children in the laws of God, that they may truly worship.
"Sow the good seed, and the Lord will furnish the ripe harvest in its season."
The laws governing behaviour were absolute.
Stocks for joking and raillery near the church.
Prison for the smallest theft or for the singing of lewd songs.
Death for adultery.
Suppose you were a good worker, an obedient citizen, and said, "Well, I will obey the laws
"but I have religious principles of my own and I would like to worship by them."
Well, that was an abomination.
The Puritans did not come to America to practise religious tolerance,
except of the things THEY tolerated.
They came to set up a whole ring of holy cities rooted in the church of the congregation,
and they never doubted for a moment that they had the only true prescription.
Consequently, they were much harsher on the new dissenters
than their oppressors had been on them.
And, inevitably, there were dissenters.
The Quakers were the worst.
They consulted in silence the dangerous heretic known as their conscience.
They were accused as radical meditators.
"If," said one minister, "they beat the Gospel black and blue, it is but just to beat THEM."
So it was done. A few were hanged.
The lucky ones took haven in more tolerant settlements in Rhode Island and Long Island.
This merciless prescription of what constituted the only good life
was maintained on the usual totalitarian pretext that it was essential for good order.
It can be truly argued that neighbourliness was essential to the common safety
in scattered houses harassed by the Indians.
But the worm in the apple of neighbourliness is the malice of gossip.
Neighbours bound together by a bigoted conformity see villains in all eccentrics.
Whenever the colony fell on special hard times, as it did in the 1680s and '90s,
gossip and suspicion bred the horror of witchcraft.
It descended most notoriously on Old Salem village,
and whisked a pack of men and women into jail as accused witches.
As an historic example,
across these fields one day came a respectable couple to call on their neighbour,
an old lady named Rebecca Nurse.
She was ill, and, ostensibly, this was a compassionate visit.
Rebecca Nurse's family was at once suspicious,
and, as it turned out, with good cause.
They actually came as snoopers,
as witnesses for several adolescent girls who'd had fits,
and attributed them to evil spirits coming out of the old lady.
She was brought to trial as a witch.
39 neighbours testified that she was a true and blameless Christian.
When the verdict of not guilty was brought in, two of the girls had fits on the spot.
The jury, which was sent back to reconsider, took this as certain proof of guilt.
Now, Rebecca herself was so imbued with this religious view
of what today we should consider clinical cases of hysteria
that her only comment was, "What sin hath God found out in me unrepented of
"that he should lay this affliction upon me in my old age?"
She was found guilty, and was hanged.
It was reported that the family took the body from the common pit
and buried it in the graveyard behind this house at considerable risk to themselves,
because in the 17th century hysteria, fits, were not regarded as psychogenic ailments,
but as signs of God's anger through the Devil's agency.
I don't think we should be too superior about all this.
In a less pathological form,
it exists today in too many small towns, not only in America,
namely the impulse to see the eccentric, the odd man out as a menace to the community.
And this self-protective reflex extends to the cities.
I'm thinking about the grand jury system which was invented in England centuries ago,
the idea being that before a man was brought to trial,
his neighbours, who knew him, would have a good idea whether there was a plausible case.
Well, it was abolished in England on the grounds that in a city of several millions
it was unlikely that the grand jury would know him.
But it's been retained here, and when the grand jury meets and says there is a case,
it brings in a bill of indictment.
I often wonder how many Americans, seeing a headline "So-and-so indicted",
how many people confuse indictment with conviction,
how many tend to think, with the good neighbours of Salem,
that a man accused is a man guilty.
Well... all this happened 40-odd years after John Winthrop had died.
It was a dreadful, notorious aberration from the good society that he'd founded.
To me, he's still the most fascinating, the most majestic of the fathers of New England.
Maybe I've made him out to sound like a tyrant. If so, he was a benevolent one.
He extended representative government throughout the colony irrespective of origin.
Any freeman, if only he was God-fearing, could achieve the highest post in the congregation.
His steady belief that virtue paid dividends
made him rejoice whenever Yankee ships sailed off to deliver a load of cod fish,
even to Roman Catholics, for they paid better than anybody.
If tobacco rescued the economy of Virginia, the cod saved New England.
The sea was the only continuous highway
between these two strong, opposing cultures of New England and the South.
For between them lay over 500 miles of roads so primitive
that the leading men of Richmond and Boston knew London better than they knew each other.
Between Virginia and New England were New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Delaware,
whose one tough link was the English language and the English common law.
This is the old courthouse of Newcastle, Delaware.
Like all middlemen - like Sweden, always lying between two monolithic powers -
these middle colonies tended to neutrality and tolerance.
They more readily welcomed German Lutherans, Swedish Protestants, Jacobites, Mennonites,
and Maryland was founded by a Catholic.
They produced a flexible society
in which, at the end of the day, the parson joined the baker, banker and tallow chandler
for a talk on predestination, a game or cards or a little fiddle-playing.
Pennsylvania bred independent large farmers without slaves.
Although its establishment was Quaker,
a dozen religious sects lived together without bigotry.
In particular, the middle city of Philadelphia produced a new sort of American,
a scholar citizen, politically alert, intensely practical.
An English visitor in the 18th century remarked that Philadelphia had many learned men
"whose learning is, however, always ingenious and useful".
The fine flower of this type was a man who began his career as a printer.
And in the 18th century, both in England and America,
printing was not then a humble trade.
The printer was the publisher. He was the television network president.
He was the government information officer.
If he dared to risk violating his government licence, he might be the radical propagandist.
Because he was the man who owned the only means
whereby the people could be persuaded whether they were well or badly governed.
Well, the man that we're talking about is Benjamin Franklin.
He was born to an English emigrant to Boston, a dyer from Banbury,
and he was the tenth and last child of a second marriage.
A dozen people in a tiny house was, to him, normal.
So above the howl of the small fry he played his tin whistle and argued theology with his father
and he read the "Spectator".
He sailed his boats on the river and he made his first invention,
a pair of water wings on which, he said, you can float agreeably down the river.
He came to Philadelphia in his teens. He was a free thinker at 15.
And at 71, the elder statesman of the American Revolution.
In between, he invented the lightning rod.
He started the first public library.
He was one of the founders of the American Philosophical Society.
And he thought up the idea of daylight saving.
He took part in every sort of political debate in the Pennsylvania Assembly.
He argued eloquently on the floor of the House of Commons against the Stamp Act.
And he was the American Minister to France.
He was so much the most familiar American in England
that Staffordshire potters got out a statuette of him and sold it under three titles.
"B Franklin." "G Washington." Nobody knew what HE looked like.
And "Old English Country Gentleman."
What makes him, after two centuries,
not merely impressive, but as lovable as Jefferson, and for the same reason,
is that he had this... childlike delight in the morning innocence of America,
a blithe but steady belief that they were founding a purer order of society.
I'm afraid this is a feeling that has long gone, but in 18th-century America it was a fact.
Once, when Franklin came home,
he opened a package and found that his wife had ordered some silver knives from London.
He sighed in his journal, "Alas, it is by luxury and the vanity of women
"that empires decay."
Every state is proud to recall its origins,
but once a year the whole nation honours New England in a festival celebrating its birth.
Let's say grace. Dear God, our Heavenly Father.
We bow our heads in thanksgiving for the many blessings which we have received from thee.
Give us the courage which our forefathers had on this first Thanksgiving Day 350 years ago.
Bless this food, O Lord. May it strengthen us to do thy will and further thy kingdom on earth.
Oh, isn't that lovely?
0n the last Thursday in November,
the first harvest of the Pilgrims is celebrated by every state.
0n that day, the simplest and the most sophisticated families
gather and eat the turkey and cranberry sauce, pumpkin pie, sweet potato, squash, corn bread.
All the autumn vegetables and native dishes the pilgrims had learned from the Indians,
and which assured that they would survive and plant here a new, if not a better England.
There's the cranberries.
Are you ready for corn bread? Doesn't that look nice?
- Corn bread? - Thanks.
You want some bread? Take a piece. Take a piece off the plate.
# We gather together to ask the Lord's blessing
# He chastens and hastens his will to make known
# The wicked oppressing now cease from distressing
# Sing praises to his name He forgets not... #
In the old church at Hingham, they are singing a hymn that the Pilgrims brought from Holland,
a prayer of thanksgiving.
"May thy congregation escape tribulation.
"Thy name be ever-praised. 0 Lord, make us free. "
# May thy congregation escape tribulation
# Thy name be ever-praised
# O Lord, make us free
# Amen #