November 28, 2002

The Truth About Squire Romolee

By LAUREL THATCHER ULRICH
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/28/opinion/28ULRI.html?todaysheadlines=&pagewante\
d=print&position=top

DURHAM, N.H.— As I unbag a free-range turkey bought at my local grocery store, I
think of the description of a Thanksgiving dinner in a now-forgotten novel.
"Northwood, A Tale of New England," published in Boston in 1827, launched Sarah
Josepha Hale's literary career. More than three decades later, as the
influential editor of Godey's Lady's Book, she helped persuade Abraham Lincoln
to declare Thanksgiving a national holiday.

The Thanksgiving dinner in "Northwood" takes place in the home of a prosperous
New Hampshire farmer whom Hale calls Squire Romolee. On two tables pushed
together in the parlor a roasted turkey keeps company with a succulent goose, a
pair of ducklings, a sirloin of beef, a leg of pork, a joint of mutton and an
immense chicken pie.

Surrounding this culinary menagerie is a colorful array of vegetables, pickles
and preserves. A slice of wheat bread sits on the glass tumbler at the head of
each plate. A separate table displays cake, plum pudding, custards, pies of
every description, sweetmeats, currant wine, cider and ginger beer.

When a visiting Englishman asks Squire Romolee how he can claim the virtue of
temperance in the face of such a feast, the happy farmer exclaims, "Well, well,
I may at least recommend industry, for all this variety you have seen before you
on the table, excepting the spices and salt, has been furnished from my own farm
and procured by our own labor and care."

Hale's Yankee farmer, more than Pilgrims in stiff white collars, epitomizes the
American Thanksgiving. It is our most authentic national holiday. Each November,
Americans push tables together, gathering friends and families around them to
acknowledge, among other gifts, the essential American blessings — material
abundance and the ability to enjoy the product of "our own labor and care." We
still watch fireworks on the Fourth of July, but the oratory and civic parades
that once marked the nation's birthday have largely faded. The Thanksgiving
feast endures.

Thanksgiving's authenticity has nothing to do with its presumed origins in
Pilgrim Plymouth. Certainly, there were harvest meals in colonial New England,
as in other agricultural societies, though seldom in drear November. Early
American governors did indeed proclaim official "thanksgivings" and "fasts"
according to the ebb and flow of war and the weather. During the Revolutionary
War the Continental Congress followed their example. But the national holiday we
know today was created in the 19th century as writers like Hale romanticized the
presumably rural roots of the American character.

When Abraham Lincoln made Thanksgiving a national holiday in 1863, his official
proclamation might have doubled as a fast-day sermon. The president not only
invited his fellow citizens to give thanks for "singular deliverances and
blessings" but also to ask forgiveness for the sins that had led to deaths "in
the camp, the siege, and the battlefield." That Lincoln appealed to "the whole
American people" suggests both his faith in the concept of one nation and his
hope for an eventual Union victory. But the "whole" he addressed was rent. He
commended to God's care "all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners, or
sufferers in the lamentable civil strife in which we are unavoidably engaged."

This part of the Thanksgiving story, like the slavery that ripped apart the
nation, has been forgotten.

Thanksgiving's authenticity does not derive from its history but from the way it
renews, year after year, the dream of American abundance. An overflowing table
convinces us that we are indeed uniquely blessed and perhaps uniquely worthy. It
is hardly surprising, then, that the canonical Thanksgiving locates the roots of
American nationhood in a Pilgrim feast rather than a Virginia tobacco bonanza,
where it perhaps belongs.

Historically the successful cultivation of tobacco at Jamestown in the 1620's
was far more important than the landing of a motley band of religious dissenters
on the coast of New England. But plantation agriculture is an inconvenient
foundation for a national mythology. Nor did our national myth-makers know quite
what to do with Pocahontas. Even in her recent Disney revival, as a child of
nature who tries to save her people from war, she symbolizes a lost American
dream. Squanto is a much more manageable hero. He facilitates the feast, then
fades into history, blessing the nation with his disappearance. On the American
table, Indian corn, pumpkin pie and roast turkey incorporate the Indian story
without the Indians.

Thanks to Sarah Josepha Hale and her contemporaries, Thanksgiving became a
cherished national festival. Thanksgiving is a successful holiday because it is
capable of such infinite variation. Each of us chooses our own circle, our own
setting, our own meanings, but we are united in a common commitment to
possessing and sharing the ordinary blessings of food and friendship.

I confess that I look forward to the familiar menu, the overflowing table and
the gathering of family and friends. One year I even reproduced the dinner
served at Squire Romolee's house, though I needed the help of an entire church
women's organization. This experience was a reminder, if I needed one, that even
in early America no family could do it all themselves.

I love Hale's story but, as a historian who has spent many years studying the
rural economy of early New England, I am compelled to point out that there never
was a self-sufficient New Hampshire farm. Family labor and slave labor,
subsistence agriculture and plantation agriculture, local production and English
manufacturing were entwined in the international economy that made colonial
settlement possible. A closer look at the actual historical setting in which
Hale placed her fictional farmer makes that clear.

Hale calls her hero squire and gives him the biggest house in the village.
Missing from the picture, though, is how a prosperous farmer like Squire Romolee
would have been deeply connected to the commerce that linked New England with
the ports and plantations of the Caribbean, the South and Europe. There are
fowls in the squire's dooryard, sheep in his pasture and cattle in his fields,
but in real life the salted meat and tanned hides that flowed from a farm like
his helped to sustain an Atlantic economy made rich by slavery.

Fields belonging to a farmer like Squire Romolee produced rye and Indian corn
and pumpkins for the Thanksgiving pie, but the wheat in the slice of bread
crowning each tumbler at the festal table, like the tumblers themselves, would
have arrived by ship. The wives and daughters of the New England gentry spun and
wove sheets and towels and scratchy woolen blankets, but their Sunday dresses
were made of imported silk or calico. On Thanksgiving, men drank cider pressed
from local apples, but when there was a militia muster or a church-raising, they
shared rum distilled from slave-grown sugar.

It would also be a mistake to hold too firmly to Hale's portrait of a New
England bathed in peace. In the century before the American Revolution, New
Hampshire was a mountainous borderland between New England and New France, an
Abenaki Indian enclave and a nursery — on all sides — of terror, counter-raiding
and war. The farmers who inherited this battleground turned up Indian bones with
their plows.

In Squire Romolee's feast, Sarah Josepha Hale gave mythic meaning to an
essentially domestic festival, offering ordinary Americans an opportunity to
join their own stories to the national story through feasting and sharing. But
her idyll is important not only for what it included, but for what it left out.
As we give thanks today, we should take pleasure in Hale's tale — but we might
also consider the message in Lincoln's proclamation.

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, a professor of history at Harvard University, is author,
most recently, of "The Age of Homespun: Objects and Stories in the Creation of
an American Myth."
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~`
THE TRUTH ABOUT THANKSGIVING
http://ishgooda.nativeweb.org/racial/holid1.htm


~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~`
[If you got here from frontpage Native News Online, click here to return:
http://216.97.43.231/ ]
COMMENTS?
http://nativenewsonline.org/Guestbook/guestbook.cgi
Escribe archives
http://escribe.com/culture/native_news/
http://207.126.116.12/culture/native_news/
Reprinted under the Fair Use http://nativenewsonline.org/fairuse.htm
<<<<<>>>>>
Tsonkwadiyonrat (We are ONE Spirit)
http://nativenewsonline.org/
Native News Online
a Service of Barefoot Connection

FREE LEONARD PELTIER!! "YOU ~ARE~ THE MESSAGE"