There was hardly a peep out of Monday being Columbus Day. The malcontents are happy enough to get the day off with pay. A new revelation (which is an old claim) is that “Spanish researchers have claimed that DNA and other analyses indicate that Christopher Columbus likely came from a Jewish family in Spain.” This should give some of the same people more reasons to hate him. The usual dissenters come out of the woodwork every October to denounce Christopher Columbus and November to attack Thanksgiving. Here’s one from 2020:
Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) is being called “a racist piece of trash” and a “white supremacist” after defending the legacy of the Mayflower Compact and criticizing an article in the New York Times that called the story of the Pilgrims a “myth” and re-examined the “cruel history” of Thanksgiving.
Another example comes from actor John Leguizamo who used Twitter on Sunday (11/21/22) to proclaim, “Happy indigenous survivor’s day! F*ck thanksgiving!” Leguizamo was born in Bogotá, Colombia, in 1962. Here’s some history from his country of origin:
But the pre-Columbians weren’t living in paradise either: the continent had head-chopping Aztecs who sacrificed 80,000 folks in just four days to inaugurate one pyramid. The Maya had similar bloody death cults, while further south the humourless Incas founded an empire nominally on trade but backed by ruthless might. Any detractors were killed along with family, friends, pets, plants and the back garden sprinkled with salt.
“Count me in on support,” Harris told a voter when asked if she supports renaming Columbus Day “Indigenous People’s Day.” This is from Harris a few years ago: “European explorers ushered in a wave of devastation, violence, stealing land, and widespread disease.” These are some of the same people who support Open Borders of people who bring diseases and criminal acts to our nation.
A case could be made that Leguizamo would never have been born had the Conquistadors had not arrived to rescue Columbians from the bloodthirsty pagans. And get this, “Going further back in time, it was determined that Leguizamo’s maternal lineage includes the 16th-century Spanish conquistador Sebastián de Belalcázar….”
One more thing. Columbus did not set out to prove the earth was round when most people believed it was flat. Almost everyone knew the earth was round. It was the size of the earth that was in question and the unknown landmass we know as the Americas as a geographical barrier. Here’s one of many articles I’ve written about the flat earth myth.
We are told today that the thanksgiving that was practiced in the early years of America’s founding was all about “racist genocide.” Smallpox had decimated many native peoples since there was no acquired immunity. There was no known cure. Europe had suffered for many years from outbreaks of smallpox. It was inevitable that Europeans and anyone else who had made their way to the New World that they would have brought smallpox and other communicable diseases with them. Smallpox had killed millions from every stratum of society. Between 1702 and 1703, nearly a quarter of the population of Quebec City in Canada died during a smallpox epidemic:
Smallpox is estimated to have killed up to 300 million people in the 20th century and around 500 million people in the last 100 years of its existence. Earlier deaths included six monarchs. As recently as 1967, 15 million cases occurred a year….
U.S. Presidents George Washington, Andrew Jackson, and Abraham Lincoln all contracted and recovered from the disease. Washington became infected with smallpox on a visit to Barbados in 1751. Jackson developed the illness after being taken prisoner by the British during the American Revolution, and though he recovered, his brother Robert did not. Lincoln contracted the disease during his presidency, possibly from his son Tad, and was quarantined shortly after giving the Gettysburg address in 1863. Famous theologian Jonathan Edwards died of smallpox in 1758 following an inoculation.
Global eradication of smallpox did not happen until 1979.
Back to the racism charge. The Plymouth colony served as a sanctuary for blacks. There’s speculation that “[s]ome blacks may have come from Virginia or from English colonies in the Caribbean.”
From 1623 to 1640, Colonists of black ancestry arrived in Plymouth Colony…. Although they did not have full equal rights with the English Pilgrims, they were accepted as members of the Plymouth community.
Black Pilgrims served in the Plymouth militia by the 1640s. The white English Pilgrims trusted the black Pilgrims enough to arm them with guns and weapons. These Pilgrims of black heritage would have been given military training including best usage of their weapons and marching in formation. The integrated Plymouth Pilgrim Militia included English, African Americans and Native Americans.
The Pilgrims in 17th-century Plymouth accepted the concept that blacks had God-given rights. One of these was their right to attend the Pilgrim Congregational Church. People of black heritage had the right to learn the Pilgrim [Geneva] Bible. Pilgrims taught their children to read in order to understand the teachings in the Bible. This was an accepted method of education for all colonists. All Pilgrims of black heritage would have been included — even freemen, blacks who were indentured servants and those who were slaves. (Cape Cod Times)
For more information on this story, see “At Thanksgiving, the Search for a Black Pilgrim among Plymouth’s Settlers.”
Of course, I do not want to dismiss the truth that in early America the slave trade flourished and became one of our nation’s most grievous sins. In addition, Native peoples were treated ruthlessly, but this can’t be blamed on the first Thanksgiving.
As Mary Grabar, author of “Debunking Howard Zinn,” wrote for The Federalist in 2019, [Howard] Zinn deconstructs the Pilgrims’ “first” Thanksgiving to advance his Marxist ideas of oppressors versus oppressed.
In these simplistic narratives, the Pilgrims are portrayed as wicked oppressors and the native people as angelic, oppressed victims. This is the narrative now being peddled in elementary schools around the country.
In her critique of Zinn-inspired literature used in Portland, Oregon, public schools, Grabar wrote: “It makes a cartoonish presentation of myriad people groups from the Bahamas and South America to New Mexico and New England. They are falsely oversimplified as universally peace-loving, Mother Earth-respecting, generous, and welcoming. All Indian tribes are lumped together as a mass of childlike people oppressed by the greedy capitalist explorers and settlers.” (National Interest)
The Plymouth colony learned the hard way that common ownership of property and goods was a failed economic model, something that today’s critics of some of the history of Thanksgiving have not learned. It was and is a form of slavery. William Bradford, the colony’s first governor, wrote in Of Plymouth Plantation that a communal lifestyle was “[f]or this community (so far as it was) was found to breed much confusion and discontent and retard much employment that would have been to their benefit and comfort. For the young men, that were most able and fit for labour and service, did repine that they should spend their time and strength to work for other men’s wives and children without any recompense.” When families were given their own land to work, the results were immediate. This had very good success, for it made all hands very industrious, so as much more corn was planted than otherwise would have been….”
On Thursday, September 24, 1789, the first House of Representatives voted to recommend—in its exact wording—the First Amendment of the newly drafted Constitution to the states for ratification. The next day, Congressman Elias Boudinot from New Jersey proposed that the House and Senate jointly request of President Washington to proclaim a day of thanksgiving for “the many signal favors of Almighty God.” Boudinot said he “could not think of letting the session pass over without offering an opportunity to all the citizens of the United States of joining, with one voice, in returning to Almighty God their sincere thanks for the many blessings he had poured down upon them.”[1]
Roger Sherman spoke in favor of the proposal by reminding his colleagues that the practice of thanksgiving is “warranted by a number of precedents in holy writ: for instance, the solemn thanksgivings and rejoicings which took place in the time of Solomon, after the building of the temple…. This example, he thought, worthy of Christian imitation on the present occasion.”[2]
There’s the opening paragraph of the October 3, 1789 “Thanksgiving Proclamation”:
Whereas it is the duty of all Nations to acknowledge the providence of Almighty God, to obey his will, to be grateful for his benefits, and humbly to implore his protection and favor—and whereas both Houses of Congress have by their joint Committee requested me “to recommend to the People of the United States a day of public thanksgiving and prayer to be observed by acknowledging with grateful hearts the many signal favors of Almighty God especially by affording them an opportunity peaceably to establish a form of government for their safety and happiness.”
The Reformation of History
A heritage is not something to rest upon… it is something to build upon. America has buried and forgotten her Reformed Christian history, and the tools required to unearth that history have been ravaged by postmodernist academics and forsaken by compromised theologians in American pulpits. It is not good enough, however, to uncover the truth of America’s Christian heritage merely to enshrine facts. We must restore America’s Reformational spirit and recover her biblical foundations if we are to solve our present crises or have any hope for the future.
American Christian Rulers
Based on the private testimony and eyewitness accounts of the personal lives of these men—spanning from colonial governors and representatives to United States Senators and Presidents—Giddings’s diverse collection of the Christian character that indwelled our marble halls of state for over two centuries demonstrates the former greatness of our nation, and now acts as a clarion call to renew our political integrity in a corruption-laden 21st century.
[1] The Annals of the Congress, The Debates and Proceedings in the Congress of the United States, Compiled from Authentic Materials by Joseph Gales, Senior (Washington, DC: Gales and Seaton, 1834), 1:949-50.
[2] Annals of the Congress, 950.
Author: Gary DeMar
Gary—who served as President of American Vision for thirty-five years—is a graduate of Western Michigan University (1973) and earned his M.Div. at Reformed Theological Seminary in 1979. Author of countless essays, news articles, and more than 27 book titles, he has been featured by nearly every major news media outlet. Gary also has hosted The Gary DeMar Show, History Unwrapped, and the Gary DeMar’s Vantage Point Webshow and is a regular contributor to AmericanVision.org. Gary has lived in the Atlanta area since 1979 with his wife, Carol. They have two married sons and are enjoying being grandparents. Gary and Carol are members of Midway Presbyterian Church (PCA).
