In September 1620, a small ship called the Mayflower left Plymouth, England, carrying 102 passengers—an assortment of religious separatists seeking a new home where they could freely practice their faith and other individuals lured by the promise of prosperity and land ownership in the New World. After a treacherous and uncomfortable crossing that lasted 66 days, they dropped anchor near the tip of Cape Cod, far north of their intended destination at the mouth of the Hudson River. One month later, the Mayflower crossed Massachusetts Bay, where the Pilgrims, as they are now commonly known, began the work of establishing a village at Plymouth.
Throughout that first brutal winter, most of the colonists remained on board the ship, where they suffered from exposure, scurvy and outbreaks of contagious disease. Only half of the Mayflower’s original passengers and crew lived to see their first New England spring. In March, the remaining settlers moved ashore, where they received an astonishing visit from an Abenaki Indian who greeted them in English. Several days later, he returned with another Native American, Squanto, a member of the Pawtuxet tribe who had been kidnapped by an English sea captain and sold into slavery before escaping to London and returning to his homeland on an exploratory expedition. Squanto taught the Pilgrims, weakened by malnutrition and illness, how to cultivate corn, extract sap from maple trees, catch fish in the rivers and avoid poisonous plants. He also helped the settlers forge an alliance with the Wampanoag, a local tribe, which would endure for more than 50 years and tragically remains one of the sole examples of harmony between European colonists and Native Americans.
In November 1621, after the Pilgrims’ first corn harvest proved successful, Governor William Bradford organized a celebratory feast and invited a group of the fledgling colony’s Native American allies, including the Wampanoag chief Massasoit. Now remembered as American’s “first Thanksgiving”—although the Pilgrims themselves may not have used the term at the time—the festival lasted for three days. While no record exists of the historic banquet’s exact menu, the Pilgrim chronicler Edward Winslow wrote in his journal that Governor Bradford sent four men on a “fowling” mission in preparation for the event, and that the Wampanoag guests arrived bearing five deer. Historians have suggested that many of the dishes were likely prepared using traditional Native American spices and cooking methods. Because the Pilgrims had no oven and the Mayflower’s sugar supply had dwindled by the fall of 1621, the meal did not feature pies, cakes or other desserts, which have become a hallmark of contemporary celebrations.
Lobster, seal and swans were also said to be on the Pilgrims’ menu.
Thanksgiving Becomes an Official Holiday
Pilgrims held their second Thanksgiving celebration in 1623 to mark the end of a long drought that had threatened the year’s harvest and prompted Governor Bradford to call for a religious fast. Days of fasting and thanksgiving on an annual or occasional basis became common practice in other New England settlements as well.
During the American Revolution, the Continental Congress designated one or more days of thanksgiving a year, and in 1789 George Washington issued the first Thanksgiving proclamation by the national government of the United States; in it, he called upon Americans to express their gratitude for the happy conclusion to the country’s war of independence and the successful ratification of the U.S. Constitution. His successors John Adams and James Madison also designated days of thanks during their presidencies.
In 1817, New York became the first of several states to officially adopt an annual Thanksgiving holiday; each celebrated it on a different day, however, and the American South remained largely unfamiliar with the tradition. In 1827, the noted magazine editor and prolific writer Sarah Josepha Hale, launched a campaign to establish Thanksgiving as a national holiday. For 36 years, she published numerous editorials and sent scores of letters to governors, senators, presidents and other politicians.
Abraham Lincoln finally heeded her request in 1863, at the height of the Civil War, in a proclamation entreating all Americans to ask God to “commend to his tender care all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife” and to “heal the wounds of the nation.”
He scheduled Thanksgiving for the final Thursday in November, and it was celebrated on that day every year until 1939, when Franklin D. Roosevelt moved the holiday up a week in an attempt to spur retail sales during the Great Depression. Roosevelt’s plan, known derisively as Franksgiving, was met with passionate opposition, and in 1941 the president reluctantly signed a bill making Thanksgiving the fourth Thursday in November.
Thanksgiving Controversies
For some scholars, the jury is still out on whether the feast at Plymouth really constituted the first Thanksgiving in the United States. Indeed, historians have recorded other ceremonies of thanks among European settlers in North America that predate the Pilgrims’ celebration.
In 1565, for instance, the Spanish explorer Pedro Menéndez de Avilé invited members of the local Timucua tribe to a dinner in St. Augustine, Florida, after holding a mass to thank God for his crew’s safe arrival.
On December 4, 1619, when 38 British settlers reached a site known as Berkeley Hundred on the banks of Virginia’s James River, they read a proclamation designating the date as “a day of thanksgiving to Almighty God.”
Some Native Americans and others take issue with how the Thanksgiving story is presented to the American public, and especially to schoolchildren.
In their view, the traditional narrative paints a deceptively sunny portrait of relations between the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag people, masking the long and bloody history of conflict between Native Americans and European settlers that resulted in the deaths of millions.
Since 1970, protesters have gathered on the day designated as Thanksgiving at the top of Cole’s Hill, which overlooks Plymouth Rock, to commemorate a “National Day of Mourning.” Similar events are held in other parts of the country.
Thanksgiving’s Ancient Origins
Although the American concept of Thanksgiving developed in the colonies of New England, its roots can be traced back to the other side of the Atlantic. Both the Separatists who came over on the Mayflower and the Puritans who arrived soon after brought with them a tradition of providential holidays—days of fasting during difficult or pivotal moments and days of feasting and celebration to thank God in times of plenty.
As an annual celebration of the harvest and its bounty, moreover, Thanksgiving falls under a category of festivals that spans cultures, continents and millennia.
In ancient times, the Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans feasted and paid tribute to their gods after the fall harvest. Thanksgiving also bears a resemblance to the ancient Jewish harvest festival of Sukkot. Finally, historians have noted that Native Americans had a rich tradition of commemorating the fall harvest with feasting and merrymaking long before Europeans set foot on their shores.
When most Americans think of the first Thanksgiving, their minds probably turn to a semi-mythical 17th-century feast shared by pilgrims and Native Americans. Fewer may know that the modern version of a nation-wide Thanksgiving holiday didn’t actually come about until the late 19th century.
It was 1863 when President Abraham Lincoln issued a proclamation declaring “a Day of Thanksgiving and Praise,” the culmination of a 36-year campaign started by so-called “mother” or “godmother” of Thanksgiving, Sarah Josepha Buell Hale.
Born on a New Hampshire farm in 1788, Hale was known as the “Lady Editor” of Godey’s Lady’s Book, a periodical founded by the “plump, benign” publisher Louis Godey and “[b]y far the most phenomenally successful of any magazine issued before the Civil War,” as TIME put it in 1930.
Under her leadership, the publication popularized white wedding dresses and Christmas trees, trends often credited to Britain’s Queen Victoria. In the magazine’s pages, Hale swore by the wrinkle-busting power of applying brown butcher paper soaked in apple vinegar to the forehead and described pigeons as “about the only bird in New England worth cooking.”
TIME also characterized her as “a crusader urging the admission of women to the practice of medicine, more thorough female education, foreign missions,” while Fortune‘s columnist John Chamberlain wrote that “she was annoyed by the menial position of pre-Civil War women and proceeded to put the flattering term ‘domestic science’ into the language” in the magazine’s A History of American Business.
She even helped finance the all-female Vassar College, founded in 1861. But she did not believe in women’s suffrage, nor did she believe that women could do all professions just as well as men. Rather, as a widow and mother of five children, she believed that a high-quality education was essential to preparing women for “the most important vocation on earth…that of the Christian mother in the nursery.”
Her lobbying effort to make Thanksgiving holiday can be traced back to a passage of her 1827 novel Northwood. “We have too few holidays,” she wrote. “Thanksgiving like the Fourth of July should be a national festival observed by all the people … as an exponent of our republican institutions.” According to Melanie Kirkpatrick’s history of the occasion, Thanksgiving: The Holiday at the Heart of the American Experience, in addition to publishing editorials in Godey’s Lady’s Book, Hale would promote her campaign by publishing Thanksgiving-themed poems, tales of families happily dining together, and recipes for autumnal fare like roast turkey, pumpkin pie and sweet potato pudding, to make people hunger for a day when they could eat all of these delicious foods.
She also launched a letter-writing campaign to members of Congress, governors and Presidents. President Zachary Taylor said around 1849 that it was up to the states to decide when and whether to declare a Thanksgiving holiday; in that period, such a holiday was often celebrated anywhere from September to December, depending on the place.
Some politicians thought the “day of public thanksgiving and prayer” declared by George Washington in 1789 violated the separation of church and state. And some in the South saw Thanksgiving as “another manifestation of intrusive, New England moralism,” according to Ryan P. Jordan’s Church, State, and Race: The Discourse of American Religious Liberty, 1750-1900. That’s one reason why Virginia Governor Henry Wise said he would not support this “theatrical national claptrap that is Thanksgiving.”
But, in a Sept. 28, 1863 letter to President Abraham Lincoln, Hale argued the other side. She made the case that a “National and fixed Union Festival” should occur on the last Thursday of November, annually, because the last Thursday of November was when George Washington had declared the first national Thanksgiving in 1789.
On Oct. 3, Lincoln issued the proclamation designating “the last Thursday of November” as a day of Thanksgiving, arguing in several newspaper editorials that, “in the midst of a civil war of unequalled magnitude and severity, the American people should take some time for gratitude.”
Next, Hale turned her efforts to making Thanksgiving a law of the land through an act of Congress—but she passed away in 1879 at the age of 91. It would be more than 60 years until President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed a joint resolution, passed by Congress, which took into account years when there are five Thursdays in November and declared the fourth Thursday of the month a Federal Thanksgiving Day holiday.
Sarah’s parents were strong advocates for education of both sexes. Therefore, Hale was taught well beyond the normal age for a woman. Later, she married a lawyer David Hale, who supported her in all scholarly endeavors. Sadly, her husband died after only nine years of marriage, leaving Hale a widow with five children. She turned to poetry as a form of income. Her most famous book, titled Poems for Our Children included a beloved story from her childhood. “Mary Had a Little Lamb” was instantly a popular nursey rhyme. In 1837, she became the editor of the Godey’s Lady’s Book. Her work with the magazine made her one of the most influential voices in the 19th century. Her columns covered everything from women’s education to child rearing.
Hale also used her platform to support other causes, including abolishing slavery and, later, colonization (freeing African Americans and sending them to Africa). While working as editor, she raised money for various historic sites. Hale helped to preserve George Washington’s home and financially supported the construction of the Bunker Hill Monument. Her work in historic preservation has stood the test of time, as both sites are still open to public.
Hale has been criticized heavily for her support of gender roles. As an editor, she encouraged women to focus their efforts in the domestic realm. A proper woman, to Hale not only managed the home but she also imparted religion to her children. Godey’s Lady Book was widely known for its conservative views for much of the 19th century. Additionally, Hale did not support the women’s suffrage movement because she believed that women’s participation in politics would limit their influence in the home. However, Hale did use the magazine to advocate for the education of women and the rights of women as property owners. Hale retired as editor in 1877 and died two years later at the age of 92.
So, as you sit down to dinner this Thanksgiving, take a moment to raise your glass and toast the grandmother of Thanksgiving, Sarah Josepha Hale.
Happy Thanksgiving Everyone!