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Each November, numerous articles chronicle the arrival of the 17th-century English Pilgrims and Puritans and their quest for religious freedom. They tell of the founding of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and the celebration of the first Thanksgiving.

In the popular mind, the two groups are synonymous. In the story of the quintessential American holiday, they have become inseparable protagonists in the origin story.

But as a scholar of English and American history, I know there are significant differences between the two groups. Nowhere is this more telling than in religious beliefs and their treatment of Native Americans.

Where did the pilgrims come from?

The Pilgrims arose out of the English Puritan movement that arose in the 1570s. The Puritans wanted the English Protestant Reformation to go forward. They wanted to rid the Church of England of “papist” – meaning Catholic – elements such as bishops and kneeling at services.

Each Puritan congregation made its own covenant with God and answered only to the Almighty. The Puritans were looking for evidence of a “godly life,” that is, evidence of their own prosperous and virtuous life that would ensure their eternal salvation. They saw worldly success as a sign, though not necessarily a guarantee, of eventual entrance into heaven.

After 1605, some Puritans became what scholar Nathaniel Philbrick calls “puritans with a vengeance.” They embraced “extreme separatism,” distancing themselves from England and its corrupt church.

These Puritans would soon become “pilgrims” – literally meaning they would be prepared to travel to distant lands to worship at will.

In 1608, a group of 100 pilgrims sailed to Leiden, Holland and became a separate church living and worshiping on their own.

They were not satisfied in Leiden. Believing that Holland was also sinful and ungodly, they decided in 1620 to venture to the New World in a leaky vessel called the Mayflower. Fewer than 40 Pilgrims joined the 65 infidels, whom the Pilgrims called “strangers,” on the arduous journey to what would become Plymouth Colony.

Weight, Survival, and Thanksgiving in America

Most Americans know that more than half of the Mayflower’s passengers died in the first harsh winter of 1620-1621. The fragile colony survived only with the help of Native Americans – most famously Squanto. To commemorate, not celebrate, their survival, the Pilgrims joined the Native Americans in a grand mass in the fall of 1621.

But for the Pilgrims, what we know today as Thanksgiving was not a holiday; rather, it was a spiritual devotion. Thanksgiving was a solemn occasion and not a holiday. It wasn’t a holiday.

However, Plymouth was dominated by the 65 foreigners, who were largely uninterested in what the Pilgrims saw as pressing questions of their own eternal salvation.

There were few Protestant clergy among the pilgrims, and within a few years they found themselves what historian Mark Peterson calls “spiritual orphans.” Lay Pilgrims like William Brewster held services but could not administer Puritan sacraments.

Pilgrims and Native Americans in the 1620s

At the same time, the Pilgrims did not actively seek the conversion of Native Americans. According to scholars such as Philbrick, English author Rebecca Fraser, and Peterson, the Pilgrims valued and respected the intellect and common humanity of Native Americans.

An early example of the Pilgrims’ respect for Native American humanity came from the pen of Edward Winslow. Winslow was one of the principal Pilgrim founders of Plymouth. In 1622, just two years after the arrival of the Pilgrims, he published in the mother country the first book on New England life, Mourt’s Relation.

Although he considered the Native Americans “a people without any religion or knowledge of God,” he nevertheless praised them for being “very trustworthy, quick to understand, intelligent, just.”

Winslow added that “we found the Indians very faithful in their covenant of peace with us; very loving … we often go to them, and they come to us; some of us were fifty miles overland into the country with them.”

In Winslow’s second published book, “Good Newes from New England (1624),” he recounted at length nursing the Wampanoag leader Massasoit as he lay dying, even to the point of feeding him spoonful of chicken broth. Fraser calls this episode “very tender.”

Puritan exodus from England

The thousands of non-Pilgrim Puritans who stayed behind and struggled in England would not share Winslow’s views. They were more concerned with what they saw as their own divine mission in America.

After 1628, the dominant Puritan ministers clashed openly with the Church of England and, more threateningly, with King Charles I and the Bishop of London – later Archbishop of Canterbury – William Laud.

So hundreds and then thousands of Puritans made the momentous decision to leave England behind and follow the little band of pilgrims to America. These Puritans never considered themselves separatists, however. Following what they believed would be the ultimate triumph of the Puritans who remained in the mother country, they would return to help govern England.

The American Puritans of the 1630s and beyond were more ardent and nervous about salvation than the Pilgrims of the 1620s. The Puritans strictly regulated both church and society and demanded proof of godly status, that is, proof of a prosperous and virtuous life leading to eternal salvation. They were also very aware of that divinely sent mission to the New World.

Puritans believed they needed to seek out and convert Native Americans in order to “raise them to godliness.” Tens of thousands of Puritans therefore poured into the Massachusetts Bay Colony in what became known as the “Great Migration.” By 1645, they had already surrounded and would eventually absorb the remnants of Plymouth Colony.

Puritans and Native Americans in the 1630s and beyond

Dominated by hundreds of Puritan clergymen, the Massachusetts Bay Colony was all about emigration, expansion, and evangelism during this period.

As early as 1651, Puritan evangelists such as Thomas Mayhew converted 199 Native Americans labeled by the Puritans as “Praying Indians.”

For those Native Americans who converted to Christianity and prayed with the Puritans, there was an uneasy harmony with the Europeans. For those who resisted what the Puritans considered “God’s mission,” there was harsh treatment—and often death.

But even for those who yielded to the evangelism of the Puritans, their culture and destiny changed dramatically and unchanged.

War with Native Americans

A devastating result of Puritan cultural dominance and prejudice was King Philip’s War of 1675-76. The Massachusetts Bay Colony feared that the Wampanoag chief Metacom—dubbed “King Philip” by the Puritans—planned to attack English settlements in New England in revenge for the killing of the “Praying Indian” John Sassamon.

This suspicion turned into a 14-month all-out war between settlers and Native Americans for land, religion, and control of the region’s economy. The conflict would prove to be one of the bloodiest per capita in American history.

By September 1676, thousands of Native Americans had been killed and hundreds more sold into slavery and servitude. King Philip’s War set an ominous precedent for Anglo-Native American relations in most of North America for centuries to come.

The true heritage of the Pilgrims

So the Puritans and the Pilgrims came out of the same religious culture of 1570s England. They separated in the early 1600s, but arrived 70 years later as one and the same in the New World.

Meanwhile, the Pilgrim separatists sailed to Plymouth, survived a terrible first winter, and convened a robust harvest meal with the Native Americans. Traditionally, the Thanksgiving holiday commemorates the courage and tenacity of early settlers.

However, the humanity that Pilgrims like Edward Winslow showed to the Native Americans they encountered was sadly and tragically not shared by the Puritan settlers who followed them. Therefore, the ultimate legacy of Thanksgiving is and will remain mixed.

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