Today is Thanksgiving, the national day to stop and give thanks. You might be gathering with your family to eat, watch a football game or start your Christmas shopping. If you are like the family I grew up in, you might even recreate the first Thanksgiving Day by dressing as Pilgrims and Native Americans and sharing a meal together.

Why do we call those early residents of Plymouth Colony the Pilgrims? The word pilgrim means a wanderer. It seems to me that they were more like settlers – people who took a piece of wilderness and turned it into a town or city, not a vagabond that drifted about, homeless and seeking after something beyond themselves. It was never their intent to live a nomadic life. The people who set out on the Mayflower to travel to North America were intentionally trying to find a new place to set down their roots. In fact, their aim was to sail to New York (then called northern Virginia.) They had a charter from the Virginia Company, a British state-owned trading company that financed the trip in exchange for a share in the profits from the trade that would be established by the new colony. They were to create this colony on the Hudson River. The problem was that after sailing for 65 days in very rough seas, they were blown off course about 250 miles and ended up in Massachusetts. That was when they discovered a very big problem. There were some men aboard the Mayflower that argued that their charter had been to land the boat somewhere else. Since they were not where they were supposed to be, they could not be held accountable to the rules established before they set sail. They let it be known that the community that was supposed to be formed was null and void. It would be every man, woman and child fending on their own as soon as they disembarked from the ship. Thus, they truly would be pilgrims wandering about the wilderness. Mutiny was in the air.

What came of this was a solution, out of necessity, that set the stage for the new nation that was to come. There were 102 passengers aboard the Mayflower. Among them were 41 Christian separatists who had sailed to the shores of Massachusetts – the ones we typically call Pilgrims. These separatists came up with a new charter that defined the rules of a new community. It has become known as the Mayflower Compact. It established four broad laws that would govern the colony.

• They would be self-governed even though they remained loyal to the King of England.

• They would establish and abide by laws for the good of the colony.

• They would establish one society.

• They would live in accordance with the Christian faith.

Before they got off the ship, 41 men signed the Mayflower Compact to establish a new government for the colony. They elected leaders and set out to create a new society. They were the first self-governed group of settlers in what became the United States.

That still does not explain why we call them Pilgrims. The truth is, they didn’t refer to themselves as Pilgrims. They called themselves "Old Comers.” Ten years after they arrived, William Bradford, Plymouth Colony’s second governor, wrote about the Christian separatists who made the voyage in 1620 across the Atlantic, calling them "saints and pilgrims.” But the name really didn’t stick for another 200 years when Daniel Webster gave a speech about the brave Pilgrims who established a self-governed colony on the shores of America. Webster was quick to point out this democratic society because he was part of a new revolutionary ideology that sparked the American colonies’ fight for independence. From that point on, those Old Comers became known as Pilgrims – who wandered across the Atlantic to establish a new society based on the rights of people to elect their own leaders, own property, establish commerce, speak their minds, establish laws to determine fairness and to worship as they saw fit.

When you sit down and eat your Thanksgiving meal, take a moment to reflect on your own blessings. Among them should be a group of people who established a set of rules that helped us become who we are today.

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Painting: The Mayflower Compact, 1620 by Jean Leon Gerome Ferris

The Pilgrims, History.com, December 2, 2009.

In a Word: How the Pilgrims Got Their Name, by Andy Hollandbeck, Saturday Evening Post, November 26, 2020.