How the ‘Godmother of Thanksgiving’ Gave Us Our Beloved National Holiday

Her name is not widely known today, but she may have been the most famous woman of the 19th century. Sarah Josepha Hale was the editor of America’s first national women’s magazine and used her platform to advance causes that were close to her heart. One led directly to President Abraham Lincoln issuing his Thanksgiving proclamation in the midst of our nation’s bloodiest conflict—the Civil War—and earned her the nickname “the Godmother of Thanksgiving.”

Hale was born in 1788 in Newport, New Hampshire, the daughter of parents who were strong advocates for the education of both sexes. At the time, not a single college in the country accepted women. That didn’t deter Hale’s parents: She got a first-rate education thanks to a rigorous homeschooling regimen, and when her brother went off to Dartmouth, he would come home on holidays and teach his sister everything he had learned, making Hale one of the most highly educated women in the country.

“By the early 1820s, Hale was happily married with four children and a fifth on the way,” Melanie Kirkpatrick, author of Lady Editor: Sarah Josepha Hale and the Making of the Modern American Woman, told Our American Stories, iHeart’s nationally syndicated storytelling show and podcast. “When her husband died suddenly, she had no means of making a living and was desperate to figure out a way to earn enough money to both take care of her children and educate them the way she and her husband had aspired.”

One of the careers open to women at the time was writing, and Hale would prove to be a prolific one. Most notable among the 129 books she wrote or edited was Northwood, an anti-slavery novel that preceded Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin by two decades. One of her poems was published in the first-ever American songbook for children, memorialized by Thomas Edison in his first-ever audio recording in 1877: “Mary Had a Little Lamb.”

Hale would soon find herself turning a startup magazine into a national powerhouse, Godey’s Lady’s Book, with a circulation large enough to make her an influential voice of her age. “She would use her magazine to develop ideas that were important to her,” Kirkpatrick said. “She believed that the Revolution had unified the country politically but not culturally. That we still looked toward Britain and toward Europe for our cultural norms.”

But it’s Hale’s role in turning Thanksgiving into a national holiday that may be the most important of her many contributions to American life. There had been Thanksgiving proclamations before in American history—George Washington issued one—but the holiday was celebrated at different times of the year, with dates set by the states and governors.

“There was no unified date for Thanksgiving. It could be celebrated any time between September and December,” Kirkpatrick said. “There was a funny saying back then that if you planned your itinerary carefully enough, you could have a good Thanksgiving dinner every week between Election Day and Christmas Day.”

She continued: “Hale believed Thanksgiving could be a unifying force in American life. The influence on family reunion, generous beneficence to the poor and public acknowledgment to the divine being who shapes the destinies of the nation—all combined to strengthen and purify the character of our republican government.”

Hale also saw this as a patriotic holiday. At the time, America had only two: Washington’s birthday (February 22) and Independence Day (July 4). Thanksgiving, Hale hoped, could be America’s third.

She started her campaign in 1847, arguing that the last Thursday of November should be the day of national Thanksgiving. It included letters to every governor, congressman and even the president at the time. Her appeal was rejected, mostly with kindness, by national and local figures alike.

“To a man, they said they liked the idea, but the Constitution didn’t permit the president to call a national Thanksgiving. That was the job of the governors,” Kirkpatrick said. “There was also a concern about it being a religious holiday and therefore inappropriate for the president to get involved with.”

One rejection letter was less graceful. Henry Wise, the pro-slavery governor of Virginia, thought Hale was championing a “damned Yankee holiday,” a “theatrical national claptrap of Thanksgiving, which has aided other causes in setting thousands of pulpits to preaching ‘Christian politics.'”

Hale was not deterred. In 1860, she penned this 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. We have sought to reawaken and increase this sympathy, believing that the fine filaments of the affections are stronger than laws to keep the Union of our States sacred in the hearts of our people…. We believe our Thanksgiving Day, if fixed and perpetuated, will be a great and sanctifying promoter of this national spirit.

The unity Hale hoped for was blown apart by the bombardment of Fort Sumter, but her resolve only strengthened. In 1863, not long after the Battle of Gettysburg, Hale lobbied Lincoln with a letter outlining her case for a National Day of Thanksgiving. Unlike the many politicians she’d petitioned in the past, Lincoln responded with a beautifully written proclamation to a nation burdened with the loss and grief of war.

“He opened by talking about our beautiful country, and he moves on to how we need to give thanks to our creator for our country and its blessings,” Kirkpatrick said. Then came this stunning passage:

No human counsel hath devised nor hath any mortal hand worked out these great things. They are the gracious gifts of the Most High God, who, while dealing with us in anger for our sins, hath nevertheless remembered mercy. 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…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.

Getting Lincoln’s blessing would have been enough for most mortals. But in 1871, Hale began a new campaign to have the national Thanksgiving Day proclaimed by an act of Congress. Seventy years later, the U.S. Senate and House passed a bill establishing Thanksgiving as a national holiday, to be held on the fourth Thursday of November. On November 26, 1941, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed the bill into law.

Hale didn’t live to see it happen. She died in 1879 at the age of 91, but she witnessed many positive changes in America, some of which she championed.

“As we all gather on Thanksgiving Day, Hale is going to be the unseen presence at our table,” Kilpatrick said. “I hope we all take a moment to thank her for her creativity and persistence in making this a great American holiday.”