A Brief Thanksgiving Note

On the desire for unity that inspired this national holiday

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I wanted to take a brief moment to share what I wrote a year ago on the origins of Thanksgiving as an official holiday. It’s a reminder of the long-held impulse for greater unity and harmony that I know most Americans yearn for.

It feels particularly poignant and challenging at this time of terrible division. But it’s worth reflecting on the fact that, even amid our nation’s deadliest war, President Abraham Lincoln sought new and enduring ways to create greater unity.

For nearly two decades, Sarah Josepha Hale sent letters to American presidents in hopes of convincing them to make Thanksgiving a fixed national holiday. Hale was the magazine editor of the widely read and influential Godey’s Lady’s Book. She is perhaps best known for penning the children’s nursery rhyme, “Mary had a little lamb” (the first words spoken by Thomas Alva Edison when making his first phonograph recording in 1877).

Finally, in 1863, Hale’s missive—to make a “National and fixed Union Festival…to become permanently, an American custom and institution”—landed on receptive ears. On October 3, 1863, amid what he called “a civil war of unequalled magnitude and severity,” President Abraham Lincoln wrote an official proclamation “to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise” and to seek “the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquillity and Union.”

This national holiday represented the fulfillment of what Hale had sought in an 1859 editorial: “Everything that contributes to bind us in one vast empire together, to quicken the sympathy that makes us feel from the icy North to the sunny South that we are one family, each a member of a great and free Nation, not merely the unit of a remote locality, is worthy of being cherished.”

From today’s perspective, Hale’s idea that we can be "one family” may seem antiquated and hard to fathom as a serious observation. But let’s hope that we don’t lose sight of that desire to be one America with shared values. I hope that each of us will do what we can this year and in the years ahead to seek and advance—as Lincoln urged—peace, harmony, tranquility and union.

Wishing you and yours a Happy Thanksgiving! Enjoy the pie (and all the rest).

Steven