One hundred and fifty years ago, President Abraham Lincoln signed a proclamation declaring Thanksgiving as an official Federal holiday to be celebrated on the fourth Thursday of the month of November. Secretary of State William Seward authored the document which declared and established an official day of “Thanksgiving and Praise to the Most Almighty and High God.” The document was actually signed by President Lincoln on October 3rd of 1863. The official establishment of the Thanksgiving holiday could be credited to the work of editor and author Sarah Josepha Hale. Best known as the author of the nursery rhyme “Mary had a Little Lamb” and editor of Goody’s Ladies Magazine, Miss Hale had for 36 years before 1863 written letters to newspaper editors, petitioned government officials and personally pleaded to every president to declare an official single national Thanksgiving holiday. In September of 1863 Sarah Hale wrote yet another letter to a president, this time to President Lincoln asking him to take positive action on the matter.
The year 1863 had been the bloodiest and most devastating year of the Civil War for both the Confederacy and the Union but with the fall of Vicksburg and the defeat of General Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia at Gettysburg in July of 1863, there was cause to hope that the tide was turning in the Union’s favor. Lincoln and his Cabinet all agreed it was time to thank the Lord for his blessings on the people of the nation and to ask Him to take those who had been tragically affected by the war into His hands.
The Pilgrims celebrated their first Thanksgiving in November of 1622 to praise and thank the Lord for their first successful harvest of corn and beans. From that time on, many of the colonies and then the states had celebrated the holiday at different times in both October and November. The Second Continental Congress had proclaimed a national day of Thanksgiving in 1777 to ask divine providence to aid America in its struggle for independence. President Washington repeated this day of Thanksgiving in 1789. The holiday was periodically observed in different parts of the nation until about 1815, after which it sort of disappeared from the national conscience.
The outbreak of the Civil War put the Thanksgiving holiday back on the national agenda. The State of Illinois declared a Thanksgiving celebration in 1860 after their native son Abraham Lincoln was elected to the presidency. The Confederacy held Thanksgiving celebrations twice during the war. The first was held on July 28 of 1861 after the first Battle of Bull Run, and then again on September 28th of 1862 after the second Battle of Bull Run. They never celebrated the holiday after that. President Lincoln had declared several special days of Thanksgiving before November of 1863 but it was the first official national celebration 150 years ago that has become one of the United States’ most revered and treasured holidays — and it took the dedication and perseverance of Sarah Josepha Hale and President Lincoln’s dedication to make it so.
Happy Thanksgiving!