Thanksgiving as a Civil War Invention
Holiday trivia and general 'gobble gobble'
Dear Friends:
As millions in America set a course for exceptional feats of caloric absorption, very mediocre football, and a blitzkrieg of unexceptional shopping deals, I’m here to supply loyal Crunchwrap readers with a few pieces of holiday trivia that will inevitably bore the kids, annoy the teenagers, and captivate(!) the adults at your holiday table.
The Shared Bounty Myth
Contrary to popular belief, Thanksgiving didn’t exactly grow out of goodwill stoked between the Pilgrims at Plymouth and their Native neighbors.
While some contend that the Pilgrims (and their Mayflower shipmates) did share a feast with the Wampanoag to celebrate a defense treaty, Wampanoag members contend that they were only invited to join a harvest feast after the Pilgrims fired guns and cannons in celebration and Wampanoag warriors came scrambling to honor the pact.
From Regional to National
Although Thanksgiving celebrations did exist (primarily in New England) in the 1800s across a smattering of dates, one force we can thank for the creation of a formal holiday was an influential editor named Sarah Josepha Hale who lobbied for Thanksgiving as a national holiday.
For years, and throughout 1863, she wrote several letters to powerful figures in the country including President Abraham Lincoln, arguing the case for a national holiday. In her letter to Lincoln, she wrote:
We believe our Thanksgiving Day, if fixed and perpetuated, will be a great and sanctifying promoter of this national spirit.
Civil War Roots
Lincoln got Hale’s letter and, though he had made many Thanksgiving Day proclamations before, he made a new proclamation, acknowledging the difficult times, charging the ongoing Civil War war as sin, and referencing the gifts of mercy that God had bestowed upon Americans in spite of the needless death:
It has seemed to me fit and proper that they should be solemnly, reverently, and gratefully acknowledged as with one heart and one voice by the whole American people. 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.
Many Southerners/Democrats dismissed the holiday as reeking of the New English Puritanism that was closely associated at the time with social change and abolition. As historian Joshua Zeitz argued, Lincoln’s opponents cast Thanksgiving as part of the “ism,” a sort of catch-all term at the time that sounds a lot like “woke”:
Many Democratic newspapers, like the York Gazette in Pennsylvania, scarcely mentioned the holiday, noting simply that shops would be closed, and instead devoted column space to fulminations against political preachers who stoked anti-Southern passions and promoted endless war against the South. Further west, the Indianapolis Star railed against the administration’s “Puritan abolition game” to “protract the war till the period of another Presidential election is passed, to be decided not by the people, but by the army.”
There Was Likely No Turkey at the First Feast
People get weirdly upset when someone suggests that there was no turkey at the Pilgrim feast of 1621. And while the devouring of wildfowl was absolutely possible, there is no indication that a turkey was involved.
Moreover, if one was, as Robert Krulwich notes, it didn’t stick:
Two hundred fifty years after the original Thanksgiving dinner, one of the hottest cookbooks in America, a collection of recipes from Ohio housewives called the Buckeye Cookerie, suggested a bunch of 'traditional' Thanksgiving dinners, and many of them…ignored the turkey.
So there you have it. Go forth and be pedantic, friends!
With love and gravy,
Adam