From : <Bangsflynn@ [DELETED]
Sent : Monday, April 4, 2005 7:41 PM
To : The Constitutional Principle: Separation of Church and State
Subject : A Barton - Federer fake quote?
Dear buckeye ,
I have your name from reading various comments about David Barton's
invention of fake quotes to support his political goals. I ran into his
name, and that of William Federer, and for the first time learned of his
(or rather, their) industrious approach to lying about history, while
trying to track down the source of a hoax quotation attributed to William
Bradford that has been appearing for a few years in reference to
Thanksgiving. Unaware of the coordinated purpose and wide-ranging
significance of the deceipt, I wrote a few gentle corrections to people
involved in websites that repeated the spurious document. Here is the
document, followed by my letter to one such site, and their response
(mentioning Federer and Barton as a source).
::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
[the fake document:]
William Bradford's Thanksgiving Proclamation (1623)
Inasmuch as the great Father has given us this year an abundant harvest of
Indian corn, wheat, peas, beans, squashes, and garden vegetables, and has
made the forests to abound with game and the sea with fish and clams, and
inasmuch as he has protected us from the ravages of the savages, has spared
us from pestilence and disease, has granted us freedom to worship God
according to the dictates of our own conscience.
Now I, your magistrate, do proclaim that all ye Pilgrims, with your wives
and ye little ones, do gather at ye meeting house, on ye hill, between the
hours of 9 and 12 in the day time, on Thursday, November 29th, of the year
of our Lord one thousand six hundred and twenty-three and the third year
since ye Pilgrims landed on ye Pilgrim Rock, there to listen to ye pastor
and render thanksgiving to ye Almighty God for all His blessings.
- William Bradford
Ye Governor of Ye Colony
::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
[My letter to one of the websites that publishes this:]
-----Original Message----- [This message was typed into a webpage form for
comments about the website "Goodnews and Crossway"]
From: [mailto:]
Sent: Friday, April 01, 2005 7:37 PM
To: Stephen Smith
Subject: Website Error
There is an error on the following page:
Page: http://www.gnpcb.org/contributor/ditchfield.christin
Comment: The so-called 1623 Thanksgiving Proclamation by William Bradford,
that is the subject of a publication by Christin Ditchfield, is,
unfortunately, spurious. It does not appear in any 17th-century source.
Internal evidence suggests that it is a 20th-century fraud, however
well-intended. For example, no mention of Plymouth Rock exists before it
was pointed out in the 18th century, and the term "great father" (for God)
is a 19th-century romantic quasi-Native term that Bradford never used. The
food lists are also anachronistic. The text has been circulating widely on
internet, but it nonetheless is fake.
You might be interested in an article of mine, "1621, A Historian Looks
Anew at Thanksgiving." This appeared last fall in The Mayflower Quarterly;
it is available on-line on the website of the Pennsylvania Mayflower
Society - www.SAIL1620.org
With best wishes,
Dr. Jeremy D. Bangs, Director
Leiden American Pilgirm Museum
Leiden, The Netherlands
Name: Jeremy Bangs
Email:
[The answer I received today is the following:]
Onderw: RE: Call to Thanksgiving Error
Datum: 4/4/2005 9:50:44 PM Romance Daylight Time
From: (Jutti West)
To:
Jeremy,
Here is the documentation for the bais of our tract:
One of the many sources in which it appears is "America's
God and Country: An Encyclopedia of Quotations" compled by William J.
Federer. The footnote or reference says:
William J Bradford, November 29, 1623, in an official Thanksgiving
Proclamation. William Bradford (Governor of Plymouth Colony), "The History
of Plymouth Plantation 1608-1650" (Boston, Massachusetts: Massachusetts
Historical Society, 1856; Boston, Massachussetts: Wright and Potter
Printing
Company, 1898, 1901, from the Original Manuscript, Library of Congress Rare
Book Collection, Washington, D.C.; rendered in Modern English, Harold
Paget,
1909; NY: Russell and Russell, 1968; NY: Random House, Inc., Modern Library
College edition 1981; San Antonio, TX: American Heritage Classics, Mantle
Ministries, 228 Still Rudige, Bulverde, Texas, 1988), p. 21. David Barton,
The Myth of Separation (Aledo TX: WallBuilder Press, 1991), p.86.
Jutti West
Literature Ministries Manager
Good News / Crossway
1300 Crescent St.
Wheaton, IL 60187
(630) 682-4300
::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
There are further anachronisms in the fake proclamation. For example, in
1623 there was no pastor in Plymouth Colony; pastor John Robinson was still
in Leiden, so services were led by the deacon, Elder William Brewster.
William Bradford never referred to himself as "your magistrate" in years
when he was governor. Bradford dated documents "in the year of our Lord" -
sometimes adding the year of the monarch's reign. He never referred to
landing on Plymouth Rock (not even as "Pilgrim Rock") and certainly did not
use it as a date-base. Finally, the Pilgrims did not imagine themselves as
seeking "freedom to worship God according to the dictates of our own
conscience." They wanted freedom to worship according to their
interpretation of biblical commands, which they thought was exclusively
correct (and correct externally to any dictates of their own consciences).
Federer's footnote reference supposedly giving his source for the document
(according to Jutti West) is incompetent as regards bibliographical
identification, but I made my way through it. I own the 1901 edition of
Bradford's journal that is referred to. It repeats, with correction of
minor omissions, the 1856 edition also mentioned. The Modern Lilbrary
College edition of 1981 is an abridgement of Samuel Eliot Morison's
modernized-spelling edition. None of these editions that I have seen
contains the spurious 1623 Thanksgiving proclamation. I have not seen
Harold Paget's rendering into modern English (1909), and I'm not sure what
the Russell and Russell 1968 edition is (the Library of Congress does not
have it). I have not seen the "American heritage Classics" edition
published by Mantle Ministries in 1988. The final source given by Federer
is David Barton's The Myth of Separation, p. 86.
Please forgive my length and tediousness in getting to this point. Would
you be able to look up the reference to Barton p. 86, please, and let me
know if Barton is the source for the fake Bradford document? And does
Barton himself give any source?
Thank you.
Sincerely,
Jeremy Bangs
P.S. On a related topic, you might find my article on Thanksgiving
interesting. It can be read at:
http://www.sail1620.org/discover_feature_1621_a_historian_looks_anew_at_thanksgiving.shtml
On a distantly related topic, a book of mine could be of interest: Letters
on Toleration, Dutch Aid to Persecuted Swiss and Palatine Mennonites,
1615-1699 (Rockport: Picton Press, 2004). This is about the relief efforts
that inspired the discussion of toleration in The Netherlands in the 17th
century, involving many people including Comenius, van Limborch, Locke, and
Penn, besides government bodies and officials, who attempted to argue for
general toleration and an end to persecution of dissenters.
**************************************************************************************
I don't have a copy of the original publication of
The Myth of Separation, by David Barton so I can't say what was in it.
However, I do have a copy of the third edition of that book and this is
what one finds on page 86
86 MYTH OF SEPARATION
and soe cause him to withdrawe his present help from vs, wee
shall be made a story and a by-word through the world. 8
That warning is still pertinent for America today.
The charters of other early colonies reflected similar commitments.
In 1632, the Charter of Maryland issued by King Charles described
Lord Baltimore and his goals for the Colony:
Our well beloved and right trusty subject Corcilius Calvert,
Baron of Baltimore ... being animated with a laudable, and
pious Zeal for extending the Christian Religion . . . hath
humbly besought Leave of Us that he may transport ... a
numerous Colony of the English Nation, to a certain Region...
having no Knowledge of the Divine Being. 9
On March 25, 1634, Lord Baltimore and his group arrived on the
land designated by the charter. One of the members of the expedi-
tion, Father White, recorded what occurred on their arrival:
We celebrated the mass.... This had never been done before
in this part of the world. After we had completed the [mass],
we took on our shoulders a great cross, which we had hewn
out of a tree, and advancing in order to the appointed place,
with the assistance of the Governor and his associates ... we
erected a trophy to Christ the Savior. to
In 1647, William Bradford, the leader of the Pilgrims, collected
his notes from earlier years and compiled them into the historical
work History of Plymouth Plantation. Bradford explained why
the Pilgrims came to the new world:
[A] great hope & inward zeall they had of laying some good
foundation, or at least to make some way therunto, for r
propagating & advancing ye gospell of ye kingdom of Christ
in those remote parts of ye world. 11
Quakers and other Christian groups began to settle in North
Carolina in 1653. Several years later, in 1662, they obtained a
charter confirming what was already obvious-that the settlement
had been established because the colonists were:
Excited with a laudable and pious zeal for the propagation of
the Christian faith ... in the parts of America not yet culti-
vated or planted, and only inhabited by . . . people, who have
no knowledge of Almighty God. 12
300 THE MYTH OF SEPARATION
Chapter 5
Other "Organic Utterances"
7. Democracy, Liberty, and Property: Readings in the American Political
Tradition, Francis W. Coker, ed. (NY: The Macmillan Co., 1942), p. 18-19.
Quoting from John Winthrop's Model of Christian Charity.
8. Id. at 20.
9. Documentary Source Book of American History, 1606-1889, William
McDonald, ed. (New York: Macmillan Co., 1909), p. 32, and Documents of
American History, Henry S. Commager, ed. (New York:
Appleton-Century-Crofts, Inc. 1948), p. 21. See also supra note 3 at Vol. L
pp. 327-328.
10. J. Moss Ives, The Ark and the Dove (NY: Cooper Square Publishers, Inc.,
1936, 1969), p. 119. See also Joseph Banvard, Tragic Scenes in the History
of Maryland and the Old French War (Boston: Gould and Lincoln, 1856~ p. 32
11. William Bradford, History of Plymouth Plantation (Boston: Little,
Brown, and Company, 1856), p. 24.
12. North Carolina History, Hugh Talmage Lefler, ad. (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1934,1956), p.16.
The Myth of Separation What is the correct relationship between Church and
State? A revealing look at what the Founders and early Courts really said,
3rd Edition, 5th Printing, by David Barton, Wallbuilders Press, (1992)
WALLBUILDERS PRESS
Nehemiah 2:17: "You see the distress that we are in ... come, let us build
the walls that we may no longer be a reproach."
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