November
23, 2017
MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey
THANKSGIVING DAY: My Wishes for a Joyous and Happy Thanksgiving to
Each and Every One of You and Your Families
Friends,
Today
is Thanksgiving, and I take the opportunity to wish each and every one of you a
truly joyous holiday. I am sure that most of us will be with family and
friends, and that good fellowship and great food will highlight our day.
Catching
a bit of a local PBS broadcast last night, I noticed that the state of Virginia
reminds us that despite the traditional claim of Massachusetts about the
Pilgrims having celebrated the “First Thanksgiving,” the settlers at Jamestown,
Virginia, actually gathered in thanksgiving several years before the Plymouth
colonists. I also recall that a son of
President John Tyler, Lyons Gardiner Tyler (1853-1935), who also served as
President of William & Mary College (in the days when it truly was a
Southern center for education) wrote an essay about that. (The Abbeville Institute just re-published
it, but I have lost the link.)
The
thrust of the program was that from the beginning of what became the American
nation, we have given thanks to Almighty God for His bounty, for our lives and
our families, for our homes, and for the multiple blessings bestowed upon us. When
our ancestors came to these shores they brought with them their traditions,
their customs, their language and literature, and their religious faith. They crossed
the Atlantic mostly to find better land for cultivation and for more
opportunities for them and their families. And they came largely in entire communities
of people with the same background, same race, and same national and religious
heritage.
I
can find no better example of this kind of communal migration than my father’s
family, which arrived in a group with other Scots in Philadelphia in 1718.
Eventually, they came down the Great Wagon Road to the Piedmont region of North
Carolina (ca. 1745) from which some eventually found their way to nearly every
Southern state, and by 1849, to California during the famous “gold rush.” What is fascinating is to compare the list of
family surnames that appear in census records for the little community of
Catheys Valley, California (near Yosemite), in 1940, with family names listed
in the “Scots-Irish Settlement” in old Rowan County in 1747 (as compiled by
Robert W. Ramsey in his study, Carolina
Cradle: The Settlement of Northwest Carolina, 1747-1762), with listings of parish
records for Antrim County, Northern Ireland (1680), and then with the records
of several parishes in Ayrshire and Wigtown, Scotland, a few decades earlier. Many of the same family names that appeared in
community in the early 1600s continued to show up, in community, in 1940.
That is, the very same folks who once
lived and worked and prayed together in communities in Scotland 400 years ago
continued, through later generations, to form a community, even far into the
twentieth century.
The
historian Richard Beale Davis, in his exhaustive three-volume study, Intellectual Life in the Colonial South, 1585-1763, demonstrates
conclusively that the those early settlers, especially in the Southern colonies,
brought with them their precious cultural patrimony from the British Isles, as
did the German colonists from German states, and in places like Louisiana, as did
the settlers from France. They were not, essentially, attempting to create a
completely “new utopia” out of the wilderness, but rather to continue the
experience and blessings of their inherited legacies, their customs and their
beliefs. Although by no means in
conflict with their European heritage, the colonies, in particular in the South,
did over the years modify that rich Old World patrimony, adjusting to distance,
circumstance, climate, the presence of Indians, and the mixture of additional
immigrants. The result was quantifiably conservative and localist. It was on
this foundation that the American republic would one day be erected.
And
it was a country that was firmly anchored in the land, by place and community,
and by ties of blood and family. Which is precisely why the Neoconservative and
dominant “movement conservative” position that America was founded on abstract
ideas of “equality” and “human rights,” and their rejection out of hand of the
American Founding as one inseparable from land and family, is utter
nonsense—and just one more indication of their philosophical origin over on the
Progressvist Left and in the occluded and fevered mental gymnastics of abstract
Rationalism, disconnected from the reality of American history.
Thanksgiving
is a holiday to celebrate not just our blessings and our God-given bounty, but
a day of recalling who we are and have been as a people, of remembering our
past and our traditions, of honoring our ancestors and our common legacies,
mostly from Europe, but admitting others to these shores who willingly adopt and
share our beliefs, and integrate into our culture and society.
This
is our heritage and our existence as a people; we have no other. It is precious
beyond all price, and once lost, it leaves us in despair, isolated, atomized,
and subject to the whims and dictates of “Big Brother” and the ravenous
centralizing managerial state.
With
the slight door ajar that opened this past November 8, 2016, my hope and prayer
is that together we may indeed “make America great again.” But that goal can
only be achieved if there be a true realization of who we are as a people,
understanding the critical role of our families and the importance of our
communities—and their integrity, realizing the need to recover our
constitutional liberties, comprehending the necessity of our faith, and the
willingness to gird up for battle against those—and they are many—who would rob
us of our patrimony and pervert and eventually destroy the republic.
That
is my sincere wish for this Thanksgiving. May God bless you all and grant you
His Graces!
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