After the events of September eleventh, it is both harder and more necessary than ever before to renew the sense of gratitude associated with the Thanksgiving holiday. The feast is often associated with the seventeenth- century Pilgrims at Plymouth, joined in a fall festival by Natives who welcomed them to these shores and rescued them from peril. The historical origins of our national celebration of Thanksgiving are actually much later. The custom began with a presidential proclamation after our successful struggle for freedom from imperial tyranny, and the adoption of our federal Constitution.

President George Washington, recommended that on Thursday, November 26, 1789, Americans "all unite in rendering unto God our sincere and humble thanks for His kind care and protection of the people of this country previous to their becoming a nation." Two years before the ratification of the First Amendment, Washington urged our ancestors to be grateful "for the peaceable and rational manner in which we have been enabled to establish constitutions of government for our safety and happiness, and particularly the national one now lately instituted for the civil and religious liberty with which we are blessed." The American commitment to free exercise of religion is something for which people of all faiths -- and of none -- can be grateful.

Each of the other reasons that Washington assigned for thanksgiving at the dawn of the republic is equally important in our own lives today. All of us can be grateful for "the signal and manifold mercies and the favorable interpositions of His providence in the course and conclusion of the late war." Our war for independence turned the world upside down, and our revolution committed us to the larger task of achieving liberty and justice for all. The recent debates in Congress over how far to go in equipping the government with tools to combat terrorism illustrate that we haven't yet completed the freedom project, and that we should be grateful for the enormity of the task.

Washington wrote that we should be grateful "for the great degree of tranquillity, union, and plenty which we have enjoyed." In the very moment that our tranquillity was shattered in September, our union was not. Think of the heroes of ground zero - firefighters, police, emergency workers, ironworkers - who responded immediately to the crisis in New York and Washington. And remember with gratitude the enormous generosity that welled up spontaneously all over the country to provide practical help to those in need.

Washington urged not hubris, but humility: "that we may . unite in most humbly offering our prayers and supplications to the great Lord and Ruler of Nations, and beseech Him to pardon our national and other transgressions." How stunning that as we gather to give thanks, we are also asked to be humble about our mistakes. In the words of one familiar prayer: "Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us." This Thanksgiving might take on a deeper meaning if we take more time than usual to acknowledge "our national transgressions."

Nothing can justify the murderous events of this September. We can, however, acknowledge and give thanks for the subsequent increase in attention paid to grievances - perceived and real - that other nations and peoples list as our "national transgressions," and for sincere efforts to address them.

National transgressions also occur domestically. This Thanksgiving I would like to acknowledge grievous trespasses, past and present, against Native Americans, African Americans, and women. Indians were subjected to constant dispossession of their lands and dozens of wars of annihilation. The ancestors of African Americans came here not on slave ships; their descendants were denied equality for nearly a century after the Civil War ended the violence of slavery. Women wanted to play a significant public role in the republic from the beginning, but had to wait until 1920 to vote in a federal election, and another fifty years before laws enacted by all-male legislatures were found to violate the equal dignity the Constitution promises to all persons. Other transgressions could be listed; each individual's list will be different.

Finally, on this day of thanksgiving I am placing high on my list of gratitude all who authored and amended a Constitution whose protections have been extended to and ever-widening group. May it so continue.

Happy Thanksgiving, America!

-- Edward McGlynn Gaffney, Jr. is a professor of law at Valparaiso University.