How Virginia Held the First Thanksgiving and Gave Us Freedoms to Be Thankful For

Sorry, Massachusetts, Thanksgiving started here.

According to the Virginia Museum of History & Culture, “Captain John Woodlief and thirty-seven men sailed from Bristol, England, on the ship Margaret and reached Berkeley Hundred nearly three months later in December 1619. They marked their deliverance from the stormy North Atlantic with a simple service of thanks to God, declaring that the day of their arrival would be yearly and perpetually kept holy as a day of Thanksgiving to Almighty God. This event is recognized as the first Thanksgiving in America, occurring a year before the Pilgrims arrived in Plymouth, Massachusetts.”

For Virginians that work for limited government in the face of mounting evidence that mandated equity only creates an unanimity of suffering while the connected class reigns this year’s election results still sting. Yet, we give thanks to the fact that despite the yawls and tosses of the stormy political seas, we still hold onto the constitutional railings that Virginia-born Founding Founders Thomas Jefferson and James Madison installed.

More so, though, we offer thanks to their less well-known contemporaries like George Mason, James Monroe and Patrick Henry (hard to imagine him on the ‘less well-known list’ but ask a school kid in New York City who he is) who insisted that great shield, the Bill of Rights, be included lest they vote down the U.S. Constitution.

It’s with those ten God-given rights that business owners were able to battle the woke agenda looking to force servitude and even allow for government-forced business closures. It’s with those rights that the honest kind of debate that was Jefferson’s vision for his University of Virginia is defended against censors on grounds in the courts of Old Dominion.

Sure, it’s been a rough year politically speaking, but imagine life in a country without those ten amendments to be thankful for.

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