Thanksgiving Special

An Eyewitness Account of Peace

Campaign Briefing: Gratitude, harmony, and survival in a new land2028 Presidential Campaign of Martin A. Ginsburg, RN November 27, 2025

From the Mayflower Rock — A Thanksgiving Reflection

My Mom and Aunt Joan collaborated on a genealogy of their family, with my Mom adding my Dad’s family to their final book. Their father’s family traces back to the Mayflower; her mother came through Ellis Island from Poland as a young girl in 1895. My Dad’s parents arrived in the early 1900s, his father from Russia via Europe, and his mother from Germany. I was adopted, and my mom and Aunt Joan still entered me in our genealogy—because, they said, it takes more than blood to make a family. That lesson guides me now. We aren’t breeding stock; we’re neighbors and citizens, bound by commitment as much as kinship.

On Thanksgiving I think about the hands that welcomed, the hands that learned, and the hands that helped. We can’t choose sides when we’re all Americans; we choose to show up for one another. Extending a hand to someone in need isn’t just kindness—it’s vital to our common survival.

A shoreline can look like an ending or a beginning. When the Mayflower finally reached Cape Cod Bay in November 1620, the people aboard were exhausted, short on provisions, and unsure where they could safely land. They first explored the outer Cape, taking corn from storage pits at Corn Hill—later promising and, months after, making restitution when they could—an early act that revealed both their desperation and the strained first steps of contact. Skirmishes followed at what is now called First Encounter Beach, where Nauset men defended their ground as the newcomers searched for a place to settle. The English soon crossed the bay to Patuxet—an abandoned Wampanoag village, emptied by a catastrophic epidemic years before—and began building a fragile foothold through a brutal winter.

By spring, nearly half of the 102 passengers were dead from exposure, disease, and the conditions of living aboard ship and in hastily built shelters. Survival became a shared discipline: rationing food, learning the land’s patterns, and organizing labor to erect houses before the next cold set in. The losses were profound, but so was the resolve to continue—a resolve balanced on relationships they did not yet have and knowledge they did not yet possess.

Those relationships began with unexpected voices. In March 1621, an Abenaki leader named Samoset walked into the settlement and greeted the colonists in English, a language he had learned through coastal trade. Days later he returned with Tisquantum—often called Squanto—of Patuxet, who had survived kidnapping years earlier by an English slaver, learned English abroad, and returned to a homeland devastated by disease. Tisquantum interpreted, taught planting techniques and local fisheries, and brokered meetings with Ousamequin (Massasoit), the Wampanoag sachem. Through these meetings, Wampanoag and English leaders forged a mutual-defense and restitution treaty in late March 1621 that, for a time, kept a fragile peace.

But “first contact” was not a single moment—it was a season of cautious approaches and competing memories. Some Wampanoag communities approached the newcomers warily or avoided them; the Nauset, burned by past kidnappings and the taking of their food stores, initially resisted before diplomacy deepened. In the summer of 1621, the Nauset sachem Aspinet returned a lost English boy to Plymouth—a small act that hinted at a more practical coexistence emerging along the Cape. Even so, tension flared elsewhere: the Narragansett, largely spared by the epidemic, challenged the colony in early 1622, a warning that peace in one place did not mean trust everywhere.

Context matters. The Wampanoag confederacy had been staggered by the 1616–1619 epidemic, which wiped out many villages—including Patuxet—before the Mayflower ever appeared. Modern research has suggested leptospirosis as one possible cause; whatever the pathogen, the result was social upheaval and grief on a scale that shaped every decision that followed. For Ousamequin, alliance with the English was a strategic hedge against stronger rivals; for the English, alliance was the only path to food, knowledge, and breathing room.

That first year’s “thanksgiving” was not a single prayer or mythic feast; it was a hard-earned harvest and the uneasy relief that winter might be survivable. Edward Winslow’s brief letter—the only eyewitness account—describes several days of recreation after the harvest, with Ousamequin arriving with about ninety men and contributing five deer. The record is sparse, and much of the later pageantry was layered on by centuries of retelling, but the core is clear: survival took partnership, and partnership required habit—trading, learning, mending offenses, and keeping agreements when it was inconvenient.

If we center the First Nations in this story, gratitude becomes more than sentiment. It becomes acknowledgment: that Wampanoag knowledge of corn, beans, squash, local fisheries, and the rhythms of the seasons underwrote the colony’s first real harvest; that interpreters like Tisquantum made diplomacy possible; and that the treaty with Ousamequin bought time that the colonists could not have bought alone. The newcomers also carried obligations—repaying what they had taken, restraining armed overreach, and learning that “peace” required humility in the presence of people who already knew the place you hoped to call home.

A year in, gratitude was not abstract. It was the fact of roofs that kept the wind out; seed saved for spring; fishing places learned from neighbors; and names—Samoset, Tisquantum, Ousamequin, Aspinet—who shaped a year that could easily have ended otherwise. It was the difficult truth that some communities helped, some withheld, and some opposed—and that all had reasons grounded in recent loss or long memory. Surviving the second winter meant doing more listening than speaking; more repairing than boasting; and moving from emergency to reciprocity.

From the Mayflower Rock, then, this day’s reflection is simple: carry forward a gratitude that remembers who enabled your survival; a harmony that is practiced rather than proclaimed; and a commitment to meet today’s unfamiliar terrain—our own “new environment”—with the same blend of courage and restraint. Let it guide how we speak, how we share, and how we keep faith with one another through the next hard season, so that endurance becomes a shared achievement, not a solitary boast.