Every November, schoolchildren don construction-paper pilgrim hats and recite a tidy story: The Mayflower arrived in 1620, the settlers nearly starved, friendly Wampanoag taught them to plant corn, and the next fall everyone sat down to a harmonious feast. The moral is gratitude, sharing, maybe a nod to Native generosity. It’s heartwarming. It’s also wrong.
The real lesson of that first Thanksgiving isn’t about charity or cross-cultural potlucks. It’s about incentives, ownership, and the quiet miracle that occurs when people can keep what they earn. In short: property rights.
We know the outline from Gov. William Bradford’s own pen in Of Plymouth Plantation. The investors who bankrolled the voyage, London merchants styling themselves the “Adventurers”, insisted on a seven-year communal system. All land would be held in common. All crops and livestock would go into a shared storehouse. Each family would receive an equal dole, “according to their number,” regardless of effort.
It was meant to foster equality and prevent disparities in wealth. It sounded noble. It nearly killed them.
The first winter was catastrophic: Roughly half of the original company, 52 of 102, perished from scurvy, pneumonia, and hunger. Spring planting was late and meager. By the second harvest, in 1622, the colony was still on rations. Bradford recorded the problem plainly: “young men, that were most able and fit for labour, did repine that they should spend their time and strength to work for other men’s wives and children without any recompense.” Why bust your back, they asked, when the lazy or unlucky got the same share?
Women, tasked with cooking and washing for men who weren’t their husbands, “deemed it a kind of slavery.” Even the teenage boys grumbled. The system bred “confusion and discontent,” Bradford wrote, and “retarded much employment.”
Sound familiar? Replace “storehouse” with any modern commons — overfished oceans, clogged highways, or the tragedy of centrally planned economies — and the dynamic repeats.
In 1623, after prayer and debate, the governor and elders did something radical: They assigned each family a plot of land. One acre per person, to plant “for his own particular.” The common fields remained for corn to pay the London debt, but private plots were theirs to keep, trade, or improve.
The transformation was immediate. Bradford marveled that instead of famine, God gave them plenty. Women who once pleaded illness now went “willingly” into the fields and took their little ones with them to set corn. Children who could barely walk weeded alongside their parents. Men experimented; some planted more corn, others English peas or barley. Yields soared. By 1624, the colony exported its first cargo of corn back to England.
The 1621 harvest had been modest; the 1623 harvest was abundant enough to trade with northern tribes for beaver pelts. The surplus funded tools, livestock, and eventually the payoff of the London debt. Private property turned starvation into plenty.
This wasn’t ideology. These were exhausted people staring at another winter of empty bellies. They weren’t reading John Locke who championed natural rights to life, liberty, and property or Adam Smith who described the invisible hand of markets. Those treatises came decades later. They were running a real-time experiment in human nature, testing through trial and bitter error what happens when individual effort is decoupled from personal reward. It was out of sheer necessity that they reconnected effort to reward through the simple act of ownership.
Modern ears may bristle. Property rights? On stolen land? The moral tangle of European settlement is undeniable. Yet the economic pivot of 1623 didn’t require moral perfection; it required a system that aligned self-interest with survival.
Economists call this the “incentive compatibility constraint.” The Pilgrims discovered it the hard way.
Fast-forward four centuries, and the same principle explains why some nations feast while others starve. North Korea’s collective farms produce propaganda yields and actual famines. South Korea’s family plots feed 50 million people and export kimchi. Cuba’s state sugar plantations languish, while non-state farms produce 65-80 percent of the island’s domestic food on roughly 30-40 percent of the agricultural land.
Even in the United States, the places where property rights are weakest often hurt the poorest. In Baltimore, 15,000 homes sit abandoned because title disputes and tax liens make ownership a legal labyrinth. In California, Byzantine permitting processes contribute to housing costs that are more than double the national median, pricing out the average worker. And in New York City, the recently elected mayor’s push for city-run grocery stores revives the specter of communal ownership, undercutting the private incentives that stock our shelves with affordable abundance.
Secure property isn’t a luxury for the rich; it’s a lifeline for the middle class and a ladder for the poor. The Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto showed that in developed countries, secure property rights allow assets to be used as collateral, fueling investment and economic growth. He argued that the developing world needs the same: enforceable property rights that transform “dead capital” into productive resources, enabling families to borrow, build businesses, and pass on wealth instead of wretchedness.
Thanksgiving isn’t a holiday about economics, but it is a holiday about abundance. And abundance doesn’t come from good intentions or shared sacrifice. It comes when individuals can say, “This acre, this crop, this future is mine to tend or trade.”
The Pilgrims didn’t abolish community. They still tithed corn to the common store, still held feasts, still relied on neighbors when illness struck. Property rights didn’t make them selfish; they made their rational self-interest productive, benefiting not only themselves but everyone else too. The same hands that once hoarded leisure now hoarded seed corn because next year’s harvest was theirs to lose.
Bradford closed his account of the 1623 experiment with a line worth etching into our collective memory, lest future generations forget where their abundance comes from and repeat the Pilgrims’ hard lessons: this “had very good success, for it made all hands very industrious, so as much more corn was planted than otherwise would have been.”
More corn. More trade. More children surviving winter. More time for psalms and schooling and the slow work of building a commonwealth.
So this Thanksgiving, when the table groans under turkey and pie, lift a glass to the acre. To the deed. To the quiet contract that says what’s yours is yours, and what’s mine I must earn. The Pilgrims didn’t invent the idea. They figured it out because their lives literally depended on it, proving that private property rights transform famine into feast. This pivotal lesson made our existence possible, igniting the greatest economic expansion in human history.
And for that, we can all give thanks.
Claudia Williamson Kramer is the Scott L. Probasco, Jr., Distinguished Chair of Free Enterprise, Professor of Economics, and Executive Director of the Center for Economic Education at UTC.
To hear more from Dr. Kramer, listen to her latest conversation on WUTC here: https://shorturl.at/CyWM0
