You are invited to read this commentary from the Free Enterprise Foundation. It will make you think!

Thanksgiving 2009

“In the name of God, Amen, We whose names are underwritten, the loyal subjects of our dread Sovereign Lord, King James, …having undertaken for the Glory of God and advancement of the Christian Faith and Honour of our King and Country, a Voyage to plant the First Colony in the Northern Parts of Virginia, do by these presents solemnly and mutually in the presence of God and one of another, Covenant and Combine ourselves together into a Civil Body Politic,…” Mayflower Compact, 1620

The Mayflower compact is too wordy for my customary introductory quote, but the portion above is unquestionable in its profession of faith as the ruling influence in the lives of those who risked all in reaching our shores 389 years ago. It is Faith as the ruling force in our lives which is missing today and without which our future is at risk. When you think about what this band of settlers had undertaken and the challenges and hardships endured just to get to our shores, the two hundred words, more or less of The Compact, are remarkably concise in attesting their commitment going forward. It is that commitment we must emulate.

Today we look back on a one time celebration of nature’s bounty in a wilderness without the emotional connection to what they really had accomplished. Through unstinting Faith over years in an Old World wilderness equally as dangerous for them as this New World that beckoned and on whose threshold they clung, they could honestly claim the mantle of “The Faithful.”

We call them Puritans and Pilgrims, for that is what they were, but they preferred to be thought of as “Separatists.” The Separatists were an offshoot of the Church of England that took the original efforts to reform the Church to an extreme. If the heavy emphasis on the trappings of worship by the Romans was idolatry, was their church’s ceremony much better? For them it stood in the way of directly worshiping God as He intended and the Commandments ordered.

With their King, the anointed head of a National Church that still feared the efforts of the Roman Masters it had overthrown at a bloody cost over a hundred years of intrigue, any dissent was viewed by many as treason. Is it any wonder then that they were not prone to call attention to themselves? To live without fear, many emigrated to Leyden in Holland, seeking the tolerance for which the Low Countries have long been known.

For more than a decade, they continued to miss their familial and religious ties to those who remained in England and had trouble finding employment. Following the successful settlement at Jamestown, (and the first real “Thanksgiving” there,) several corporate exploratory and settlement companies were created in England to invest in the financial promise of the New World. After more than a decade apart, the separatists sought and received Patents from the Virginia Company for lands close to “North Virginia” and traded labor in the New World for the cost of transportation. It took three years of planning, but plans turned to action in the spring of 1620 with the purchase of the Speedwell and The Mayflower.

The Leyden group departed for Plymouth England in mid July and joined with a bigger body determined to risk all to embrace the freedom in the New World. Over the next several months, two departures were attempted and failed. The Speedwell leaked like a sieve and was finally abandoned and put up for sale. A number of its Puritans gave up; while, determined to risk whatever fortune awaited, others crowded into an already overburdened Mayflower.

In mid September, what we estimate to be 102 settlers embarked on The Mayflower for a nine week voyage that would fully test their faith and fortitude. Legendary sea captain John Smith, veteran of the earlier trip to explore Virginia, later described the experience, “But being pestered [vexed] nine weeks in this leaking unwholesome ship, lying wet in their cabins; most of them grew very weak and weary of the sea.” They experienced horrible weather, death of both crew and passengers, and a dangerous split in a main support beam that threatened to founder the ship. At the end of their voyage, due to some skullduggery by the Company of The Northern Plantations, the captain delivered them up to the shore of Cape Cod where they had no rights and were faced with the necessity to negotiate with a different company after-the-fact.

The first winter was equally as harsh and costly to their company, and it is a testament to their fortitude and the grace of their God, that a decade later John Winthrop could write, "For we must consider that we shall be as a City Upon a Hill, the eyes of all people are upon us; so that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken and so cause him to withdraw his present help from us,...we shall shame the faces of many of God's worthy servants and cause their prayers to be turned into curses until we be consumed out of the good land whither we are going..."

Almost four centuries later, President Ronald Reagan could speak of the people and the nation that rose from these early settlers as having been constructed with faith in their Creator at its core to become a “Shining City on A Hill!” For this nation, built on that faith to continue on the road to which we have been called and for which our ancestors endured such hardships, we must recapture our ancestors’ old fashioned dependence on patience, prudence, faithfulness and prayer.

No politician or self proclaimed national leader can ever successfully lead this nation without understanding that bond of Faith that is the driving force at the core of this nation. This Thanksgiving please join with me and my family in celebrating the Faith of our Fathers and a rededication to those values at the heart of this great day of Thanks Giving!

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Copyright © 2009 by Robert E. Freer, Jr. All rights reserved

Robert E. Freer, Jr., is president of the Free Enterprise Foundation. He is also a professor at The Citadel and was selected in 2005 to be their first John S. Grinalds Leader in Residence and in 2009 to be their first BB&T Visiting Professor in Ethics and Free Enterprise Leadership. A regular contributor to the Mercury, Prof. Freer may be reached at Robert.freer@citadel.edu. If you would like him to appear before your group or organization to speak on any of the subjects about which he writes, please contact him at The Citadel. Copies of his earlier columns may be found at www.FreeEnterpriseFoundation.org.