News Article

Give Thanks for This Gift of Virginia
by Frank B. Atkinson
May 11, 2007

This op/ed was published in the Richmond Times-Dispatch.


The debate over who held the "first thanksgiving" in America has occupied partisans in Virginia and Massachusetts for decades. Massachusetts has the popular advantage. Yet, because "facts are stubborn things," as John Adams famously declared, Virginia retains the superior claim.

But such arguments, like those over the primacy of Jamestown versus Plymouth, miss a much larger point.

On this momentous weekend, when Americans join Virginians in commemorating Jamestown's founding, the point is not who first gave thanks centuries ago, but whether we will first give thanks now, as we usher in America's fifth century.

Millions of years before the three small ships made their way across the Atlantic to Jamestown, another traveler - one celestial in origin - made its way to Virginia from an unknown point in the universe. The three-mile wide object, traveling at 75 times the speed of sound, crashed into the shallow ocean at the site of present-day Cape Charles, Virginia. The largest to impact the Earth since the cataclysmic death of the dinosaurs, the meteor produced a tsunami that lapped the Virginia mountains and left a crater in the ocean floor twice the size of Rhode Island and nearly as deep as the Grand Canyon.

This remarkable event, recently discovered by geologists, bears a direct causal relation to Virginia's role as the birthplace of modern America and the cradle of democracy in the modern world.

AS THE WATERS of the ocean receded over time, the crater became a vital agent in forming the Chesapeake Bay and its uniquely rich estuary system. Nature and man then interacted in ways that changed the course of human history.

The nurturing Chesapeake estuaries became home to the Powhatan Confederacy, an Indian society that was already highly developed when Englishmen, also attracted to the natural protections and abundance of the Chesapeake region, came to found a settlement in 1607. Without the assistance of the Powhatans in the nourishing bosom of the Bay, the Jamestown settlement would not have survived. But survive it did, and in nearby Williamsburg a century and a half later its heirs worked out their revolutionary ideas and mustered the mettle to assert independence from Colonial rule.

The ensuing war ended - history being rich with irony - just down the road at Yorktown, where the Chesapeake and foreign help combined with the Colonials' remarkable perseverance to lay a fatal trap for the vaunted British army of Gen. Cornwallis.

Because George Washington chose to return to his serene home on the banks of the Potomac rather than be king - an event destined to rank forever among the most consequential acts of self-denial in human history - a republic took root, and a nation at length was forged.

The question of nationhood was not resolved, however, until rebellious Richmond finally fell to the forces of the Union in 1865 after four years of carnage, much of it in the blood-soaked soil of the Chesapeake watershed.

Through that struggle the scourge of slavery, introduced in the Americas on the banks of the James, was ended. And in the crucible of that conflict a new American character was forged - one more faithful to Jefferson's transcendent declaration that all individuals are created equal and endowed by their Creator with the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

FOR MORE than two centuries, another city on a Chesapeake estuary - the capital that rightly bears Washington's name - has been the locus of decisions that provided hope for people around the world seeking freedom. Among those decisions were the orders that dispatched great vessels from Hampton Roads, near Cape Henry where the English settlers first landed, to the climactic engagements that turned back the tide of totalitarianism and saved liberty.

If we see these and other remarkable events as random dispensations of fortune or fate, then they should occupy us little now. But if we see mankind's remarkable progress toward liberty and democracy as a providential gift that confers obligation as well as opportunity, then our presence here in Virginia - the cradle of American democracy and ground zero for an explosion of freedom that has transformed the world - should be cause for profound thanksgiving and solemn recommitment.

The legacies of Jamestown and Virginia - the rule of law, representative government, free enterprise, religious liberty, and cultural diversity - are enduring and still evolving. As the fresh breeze of freedom whistles across distant shores, we know that what began when brave pioneers first set foot on Virginia's Atlantic sands is profoundly good, but far from perfect - and still unfinished.

Freedom is God's gift to mankind, Virginia's legacy to America, and America's mission in the world. Giving thanks for that gift is the right way to begin our fifth century on a journey that is still changing the world.