Imagine this:

You’re the biggest influencer in America.

You’ve got more reach than Oprah and Martha Stewart combined.

When you address Presidents, they listen.

In fact, one President in particular would actually put one of your requests into motion with consequences to this day.

The year is 1863, and that President was Abraham Lincoln.

Your name is Sarah Josepha Hale, and at your feet are the bones of hundreds of thousands, maybe even hundreds of millions of dead birds…

Turkeys to be precise.

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Sarah Josepha Hale was an American writer, poet, an abolitionist and a feminist, though the latter two should be qualified. While she believed that slavery was Unchristian, she felt that the solution lay in repatriating slaves to Africa, Liberia specifically, a not uncommon sentiment amongst abolitionists.. Also, while she championed increasing women’s roles in public life, she wasn’t a suffragist. Still, she was ahead of her times, being an important supporter of women’s education, seen, for instance, in her unwavering support of Vassar Women’s College, the second degree-granting institution of higher education for women in the United States.

The magazine that she edited for forty years, Godey’s Lady’s Book, contained a diverse array of young American voices – including the likes of Nathanial Hawthorne, Oliver Wendall Holmes and Edgar Allen Poe. Female authors were also given an unprecedented audience – in fact, before the Civil War, Godey’s was the most widely circulated magazine in America. Godey’s was the internet of its day, and Sarah Hale was its moderator in addition to being a primary content creator.

Now, a little pertinent background. Her husband died early; they were only wed for 11 years. He had been a lawyer and a Freemason, and the Freemason’s took it on themselves to help publish the widowed Hale’s first book of poems, the Genius of Oblivion.

A later publication, Poems for Our Children, included a ditty you might have heard. In fact, it’s one of the first poems that anyone’s heard, in a recording sense, given that it was the first track ever recorded by Thomas Edison’s gramophone: the poem, inspired by a school visit involving a little girl and her precocious furry friend, has come down us as “Mary Had A Little Lamb”. So there’s another example of the lasting power of Sarah Hale.

Another seemingly unrelated, but as we’ll see, a critical point: Hale was born and raised in New England.

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New England, as where the Pilgrims landed.

New England, which had mystified the memory of the first Thanksgiving; the feast when the indigenous people saved the starving self-exiled Puritans, who had chosen to leave Europe because they found it too decadent – hence the “Pure” in Puritan.

Heartwarming? Not for the indigenous, given the historical outcome. But for some of the descendants of the Puritans, it was remembered with fondness.

But this was primarily a New England thing. Sure, people practiced it in surrounding states, but by the time you got to the South, it was long forgotten tradition; there had been waves of non-pilgrims in the intervening years; plus, there were states like Maryland, that was explicitly Catholic in its charter. They would have no romance for the survival tales of the Puritans.

We all think of Thanksgiving as an all-American tradition. But it just wasn’t. And even those who celebrated it didn’t have a fixed date. It fell anywhere between October and December.

No on really remembered.

Now, it is true that Washington did issue a Thanksgiving Proclamation, which you can read here. No mention of Pilgrims, no Native Americans, no Turkeys. Nor was it to be repeated – it was just one day for all Americans to take pause and thank the God for his beneficence in the Revolutionary War.

But Sarah Hale didn’t forget. This was a cause, one worth fighting for. And writing for.

So she spent an entire chapter of one of her books, Northwood: Life, North and South (Or, a Tale of New England) to the praise delights of Turkey day, from the bird itself, to gravy, stuffing, pies, cobblers, and appropriate beverages (ginger beer for the fainthearted, currant wine and cider for those who can daintily handle such concoctions).

Mind you, this was primarily an anti-slavery book, written in 1852.

But the point is Sarah Hale loved thanksgiving, and people loved Sarah Hale.

She had already started petitioning Presidents, years before the book.

How many presidents?

A lot of Presidents.

Zachary Taylor, between 1849-1850. Check.

Millard Fillmore. 1850-1853. Marked.

Franklin Pierce. 1853-1857. Messaged.

James Buchannan. 1857-1861. Noted.

And then came the next guy. And with him, a Civil War.

Back to that slavery thing. Miss Hale had written an anti-slavery book, and which included everything you needed to know about how to practice Thanksgiving.

Now, her beloved country was in the middle of a war over slavery.

Time to write to the President.

And this time, he answered.

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Abraham Lincoln received the request from Sarah Hale, and responded on October 3, 1863, with a Thanksgiving Proclamation *[written by his Secretary of State, William H. Seward], which you can read in full here, but I will include this excerpt:

I do, therefore, invite my fellow-citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea and those who are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next as a Day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in
the heavens. And I recommend to them that, while offering up the ascriptions justly due to Him for such singular deliverances and blessings, they do also, with humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience, commend to His tender care all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners, or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife in which we are unavoidably
engaged, and fervently implore the interposition of the Almighty hand to heal the wounds of the nation, and to restore it, as soon as may be consistent with the Divine purposes, to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquility, and union.

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Once again, as with Washington’s proclamation, no mention of Pilgrims, no Native Americans, no Turkeys.

Washington’s proclamation, was in a sense, more about being thankful. They had won the war. They were, at least in theory, free. Lincoln’s proclamation is a plea; a prayer.

But the Turkeys? The pumpkin pie? The Pilgrims?

100% Pure Sarah Josepha Hale.

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The take away: Thanksgiving is often not peaceful. It’s a time of year when families gather and vent their grievances: political, religious, cultural.

But if you need help getting calm and centered, here is a simple visualization:

Imagine Sarah Josepha Hale sitting in the corner, staring at you with judgemental eyes, and remember:

This is her day. Be grateful for all that you have, and don’t ruin her day.